Sometimes I wonder why I wish to put it off. Certainly, according to my old standards, there is no point in living. But somehow I feel that the mere fact of living is justification in itself. Even for such a life as mine.
I didn't always feel this way. But then circumstances change and people change with them. I changed my circumstances more than myself, but I had no alternative. So now I exist.
I suppose I should be content. After all, I am alive and, in my own simple way, I enjoy life. I can remember people who asked nothing more than to be allowed to live—to exist. Ironically enough, I always considered them sub-normal. I felt that a man should strive to do something that would not only perpetuate the happiness of his own life but that of his fellow-men. Something that would make life more beautiful, and easier, and more kind.
It was with this feeling that I applied myself as a student of philosophy at Stanford University. And the strengthening of this same belief led me to take up teaching and embrace it as the only way of obtaining genuine happiness. My personal philosophy was simple. I would learn about life in all its real and symbolic meanings and then teach it to my pupils, each of whom, I felt sure, were thirsting for the knowledge that I was extracting from my cultural environment. I would show them the meaning behind things. That, I felt, was the key to successful living.
Now it seems strangely pathetic that I should have essayed such an impossible task. But even a professor of philosophy can be mistaken and become confused.
I remember when I first became aware of the movement. For years, we had been drilling certain precepts into the soft, impressionable heads of those students who came under our influence. Liberalism, some called it, the right to take the values accumulated by society over a period of hundreds of years and bend them to fit whatever idea or act was contemplated. By such methods, it was possible to fit the mores to the deed, not the deed to the mores. Oh, it was a wonderful theory, one that promised to project all human activities entirely beyond good and evil.
However, I digress. It was a spring morning at Berkeley, California, when I had my first inkling of the movement. I was sitting in my office gazing out the window and considering life in my usual contemplative fashion. I might say I was being rather smug. I was thinking how fortunate I was to have been graduated from Stanford with such high honors, and how my good luck had stayed with me until I received my doctor's degree in a famous Eastern university and came out to take an associate professorship at the Berkeley campus.
I was watching the hurrying figures below on the crosswalks and idly noting the brilliant green of the shrubbery and the trees and the lawn. I was mixing up Keats with a bit of philosophy and thoroughly enjoying myself. Knowledge is truth, truth beauty, I mused, that is all we know on Earth, and all we need to know.
There was a knock on my door and I said come in, reluctantly abandoning my train of thought which had just picked up Shakespeare, whom I was going to consider as two-thirds philosopher and one-third poet. I have never felt that the field of literature had the sole claim to Shakespeare's greatness.