The second of my two generalizations was slower in its making. It came when I began to scratch below the surface of the imitative life so conspicuous. Then I found a stable foundation of people who stayed at home and went about their business in their own way and without much talking. These were people who in spite of droughts and dust storms stuck to their farms, making the most of good years, saving enough to carry them through the evil ones, adding a little, year by year, to their possessions in town and country, supporting schools, churches, and incidentally lecture courses. They were people who believed in freedom to work out their own salvation and asked from the state nothing more than protection in this freedom. It was the business of government, as they saw it, to keep off the plunderers and let them alone.

Democracy to them was not something which insured them a stable livelihood. It was something which protected them while they earned a livelihood. If they failed it was their failure. If the Government did not protect them from transportation plunderers, manipulations of money, stock gambling in goods which they raised to feed the world, it was the Government’s failure. Then they had the right to change the Government, hold it up to its duty. That was their political business.

This was about what I found, the country over. When once I had learned to look beyond the restless imitative crowd, to hunt out people who were going about their business steadily, and for the most part serenely, I began to breathe more freely and to say: “Well, perhaps, after all, the men and women of this country as a whole do know what they are about. They do know what democracy means, and in the best way that they can under many hampering circumstances they are trying to live it.”

Some such conclusion I always brought back with me from my annual swings around the country, my dozens of nights in dozens of different places—the high spot of which always was the hour of searching the faces of the men and women who came to listen to what I had to say, and who, I knew, sized me up for just about what I was worth. I might be fooling myself but not them.

20
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Here then is the record of my day’s work still unfinished at eighty. Nobody can be more surprised than I am that I am still at work. Looking forward at life at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, generally finding myself tired and a little discouraged, having always taken on things for which I was unprepared, things which were really too big for me, I consoled myself by saying, “At seventy you stop.” I planned for it. I would burrow into the country, have a microscope—my old love. I knew by this time that was not the way for me to find God, but I expected to have a lot of fun watching the Protozoa and less anguish than watching men and women.

But I discovered when seventy came that I still had security to look after. I could make it by seventy-five, I thought, but I did not. And I have come where I am with a consciousness that, so long as my head holds out, I shall work. More important, I am counting it as one of my blessings. In spite of the notion early instilled into me that the place of the aged is in the corner resignedly waiting to die, that there is no place for their day’s work in the scheme of things, that they no longer will have either the desire or the power to carry on, I find things to do which belong to me and nobody else.

It is an exciting discovery that this can be so. Old age need not be what the textbooks assure us it is. Shakespeare is wrong. Cicero, dull as he is in comparison, is more nearly right. More, it can be an adventure. My young friends laugh at me when I tell them that, in spite of creaking joints and a tremulous hand, there are satisfactions peculiar to the period, satisfactions different from those of youth, of middle life, even of that decade of the seventies which I supposed ended it all.

I have been finding it a surprising adventure, if frequently disillusioning and disturbing, to review my working life, to pick out what seems to be the reason for my going here and not there, for thinking this and not that. It has been a good deal like renewing acquaintance with a friend I had not seen since childhood. Probably the reason for this is that I have never stopped long enough after any one piece of work to clean up, valuate what I had done. Always a new undertaking was on my table before I was finished with what went before. Packing boxes and letter files of badly classified material still clutter up my small space with the physical evidence of the incompleteness of every piece of work I have undertaken.

This explains why telling my story has been so full of surprises. “I did not realize I felt that way,” I have told myself more than once. “I had forgotten I did that.” “I cannot imagine why I thought that.”