I know I should find this end of life less satisfactory if it were not a working end, conditioned as it must be by certain concessions to years, easements necessary if I am to keep vigor for my two or three hours a day at my desk and, once accepted, becoming more and more enjoyable.
No one can imagine what a satisfaction it is to me to find that I need not go to conferences and conventions and big dinners. That job belongs to youth. It alone has the appetite, the digestion, the resilience for the endless talk and late hours of those functions, also the confidence that salvation is to be reached through them.
Still more satisfactory is the acceptance of the fact that I have not the strength to run about on trains and give lectures. That, too, is the job of young people, and the best I can hope for them in carrying it on is that they will learn as much about people as I think I did. The humility which that will engender will be all to their good.
A discovery which has given me joy, and which had something of the incredible about it, is the durability of friendship born at any period in one’s life. I have enlarged in this narrative only on professional friendships, those that belong legitimately to my day’s work, but this discovery does not cover them alone but all the range from childhood to now.
Circumstances, time, separations, may have completely broken communication. The break may have been caused by complete divergence of opinion, differences as grave as those which caused the breaking up of our old McClure crowd, as grave as the ghastly separations that war brings; but you pick up at the day when the friendship was—not broken but interrupted.
One of the most beautiful personal demonstrations I have had of this unbreakable quality in friendship was a birthday party which S. S. McClure gave Viola Roseboro, John Phillips, and myself when he was seventy-eight, and I close to it. Miss Roseboro had stayed with Mr. McClure when the rest of us left him. That had never made a rift in anybody’s relations with her, and now we all sat down together as once we had sat down in the old St. Denis, the old Astor, the old Holland House—lunching places that marked the stages by which McClure’s worked itself successively into better quarters, went uptown. And we talked only of the things of today, as we always had done. We sat enthralled as in the old years while Mr. McClure enlarged on his latest enthusiasm, marveling as always at the eternal youthfulness in the man, the failure of life to quench him.
One of my great satisfactions has been a revival of curiosity. I lost it in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Human affairs seemed to me to be headed for collapse. War was not over, and men were taking it for granted it was. The failure of the hopes of previous generations had taught us nothing. The sense of disaster was strong in me. What I most feared was that we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character. If you believed as I did (and do) that permanent human betterment must rest on a sound moral basis, then our house would collapse sooner or later.
It was taking a longer view, looking at my fifty years as a whole, that revived me. I thought I saw a spiral, was eager to prove it.
Once more I am curious. It is an armchair curiosity—no longer can I go out and see for myself; but that has its advantages. It compels longer reflection, intensifies the conviction that taking time, having patience, doing one thing at a time are the essentials for solid improvement, for finding answers. Perhaps, I tell myself, I may from an armchair find better answers than I have yet found to those questions which set me at my day’s work, the still unanswered questions of the most fruitful life for women in civilization, the true nature of revolutions, even the mystery of God. It is the last of the three which disturbs me least. The greatest of mysteries, it has become for me the greatest of realities.