Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

That life is an adventure it needs nothing more than the wonder of our being in the world and the precariousness of our stay in it to inform us. Although we are, perhaps, as the scientists tell us, mere inert accompaniments of certain bundles of organized matter, we tend incorrigibly to think of ourselves as unique personalities. And as we let our imagination roam over the world and dwell on the infinite variety of scenes and thoughts and feelings and forms of life, we wonder at the incredible marvel that has placed us just here in this age and country and locality where we were born. That it should be this particular place and time and body that my consciousness is illuminating gives, indeed, the thrill of wonder and adventure to the mere fact of my becoming and being.

And as life goes on, the feeling for the precariousness of that being grows upon one’s mind. The security of childhood gives place to an awareness of the perils of misfortune, disease, and sudden death which seem to lie in wait for men and seize them without regard to their choices or deserts. We are prone, of course, to believe in our personal luck; it is the helplessness of others around us rather that impresses us, as we see both friends and strangers visited with the most dreadful evils, and with an impartiality of treatment that gradually tends to force upon us the conviction that we, too, are not immune. At some stage in our life, oftenest perhaps when the first flush of youth is past, we are suddenly thrown into a suspicion of life, a dread of nameless and unforeseeable ill, and a sober realization of the need of circumspection and defense. We discover that we live in a world where almost anything is likely to happen. Shocking accidents that cut men off in their prime, pain and suffering falling upon the just and the unjust, maladjustments and misunderstandings that poison and ruin lives,—all these things are daily occurrences in our experience, either of personal knowledge or out of that wider experience of our reading.

Religion seems to give little consolation in the face of such incontrovertible facts. For no belief in Providence can gainsay the seeming fact that we are living in a world that is run without regard to the health and prosperity of its inhabitants. Whatever its ulterior meanings, they do not seem to be adjusted to our scale of values. Physical law we can see, but where are the workings of a moral law? If they are present, they seem to cut woefully against the grain of the best desires and feelings of men. Evil seems to be out of all proportion to the ability of its sufferers to bear it, or of its chastening and corrective efficacy. Our feelings are too sensitive for the assaults which the world makes upon them. If the responsibility for making all things work together for his good is laid entirely upon man, it is a burden too heavy for his weakness and ignorance to bear. And thus we contemplate the old, old problem of evil. And in its contemplation, the adventure of life, which should be a tonic and a spur, becomes a depressant; instead of nerving, it intimidates, and makes us walk cautiously and sadly through life, where we should ride fast and shout for joy.

In these modern days, the very wealth of our experience overwhelms us, and makes life harder to live in the sight of evil. The broadening of communication, giving us a connection through newspapers and magazines with the whole world, has made our experience almost as wide as the world. In that experience, however, we get all the world’s horrors as well as its interests and delights. Thus has it been that this widening, which has meant the possibility of living the contemplative and imaginative life on an infinitely higher plane than before, has meant also a soul-sickness to the more sensitive, because of the immense and over-burdening drafts on their sympathy which the new experience involved. Although our increased knowledge of the world has meant everywhere reform, and has vastly improved and beautified life for millions of men, it has at the same time opened a nerve the pain of which no opiate has been able to soothe. And along with the real increase of longevity and sounder health for civilized man, attained through the triumphs of medical science, there has come a renewed realization of the shortness and precariousness, at its best, of life. The fact that our knowledge of evil is shared by millions of men intensifies, I think, our sensitiveness. Through the genius of display writers, thousands of readers are enabled to be present imaginatively at scenes of horror. The subtle sense of a vast concourse having witnessed the scene magnifies its potency to the individual mind, and gives it the morbid touch as of crowds witnessing an execution.

Our forefathers were more fortunate, and could contemplate evil more philosophically and objectively. Their experience was happily limited to what the normal soul could endure. Their evil was confined to their vicinity. What dim intelligence of foreign disaster and misery leaked in, only served to purify and sober their spirits. Evil did not then reverberate around the world as it does now. Their nerves were not strained or made raw by the reiterations and expatiations on far-away pestilence and famine, gigantic sea disasters, wanton murders, or even the shocking living conditions of the great city slums. Their imaginations had opportunity to grow healthily, unassailed by the morbidities of distant evil, which seems magnified and ominous through its very strangeness. They were not forced constantly to ask themselves the question, “What kind of a world do we live in anyhow? Has it no mercy and no hope?” They were not having constantly thrown up to them a justification of the universe. Perhaps it was because they were more concerned with personal sin than with objective evil. The enormity of sin against their Maker blotted out all transient misfortune and death. But it was more likely that the actual ignorance of that evil permitted their personal flagrancies to loom up larger in their sight. Whatever the cause, there was a difference. We have only to compare their literature—solid, complacent, rational—with our restless and hectic stuff; or contrast their portraits—well-nourished, self-respecting faces—with the cheap or callous or hunted faces that we see about us to-day, to get the change in spiritual fibre which this opening of the world has wrought. It has been a real eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A social conscience has been born. An expansion of soul has been forced upon us. We have the double need of a broader vision to assimilate the good that is revealed to us, and a stronger courage to bear the evil with which our slowly-bettering old world still seems to reek.

But the youth of this modern generation are coming more and more to see that the gloom and hysteria of this restless age, with all the other seemingly neurotic symptoms of decay, are simply growing-pains. They signify a better spiritual health that is to be. The soul is now learning to adjust itself to the new conditions, to embrace the wide world that is its heritage, and not to reel and stagger before the assaults of a malign power. Life will always be fraught with real peril, but it is peril which gives us the sense of adventure. And as we gain in our command over the resources, both material and spiritual, of the world, we shall see the adventure as not so much the peril of evil as an opportunity of permanent achievement. We can only cure our suffering from the evil in the world by doing all in our power to wipe out that which is caused by human blundering, and prevent what we can prevent by our control of the forces of nature. Our own little personal evils we can dismiss with little thought. Such as have come to us we can endure,—for have we not already endured them?—and those that we dread we shall not keep away by fear or worry. We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnable, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living. In the light of our own problematical misfortune, we must rather live freely and easily, taking the ordinary chances and looking To-morrow confidently in the face as we have looked To-day. I have come thus far safely and well; why may I not come farther?

But in regard to the evil that we see around us, the problem is more difficult. Though the youth of this generation hope to conquer, the battle is still on. We have fought our way to a knowledge of things as they are, and we must now fight our way beyond it. That first fight was our first sense of the adventure of life. Our purpose early became to track the world relentlessly down to its lair. We were resolute to find out the facts, no matter how sinister and barren they proved themselves to be. We would make no compromises with our desires, or with those weak persons who could not endure the clear light of reality. We were scornful in the presence of the superstitions of our elders. We could not conceive that sufficient knowledge combined with action would not be able to solve all our problems and make clear all our path. As our knowledge grew, so did our courage. We pressed more eagerly on the trail of this world of ours, purposing to capture and tame its mysteries, and reveal it as it is, so that none could doubt us. As we penetrated farther, however, into the cave, the path became more and more uncertain. We discovered our prey to be far grimmer and more dangerous than we had ever imagined. As he turned slowly at bay, we discovered that he was not only repulsive but threatening. We were sternly prepared to accept him just as we found him, exulting that we should know things as they really were. We were ready for the worst, and yet somehow not for this worst. We had not imagined him retaliating upon us. In our first recoil, the thought flashed upon us that our tracking him to his lair might end in his feasting on our bones.

It is somewhat thus that we feel when the full implications of the materialism to which we have laboriously fought our way dawn upon us, or we realize the full weight of the sodden social misery around us. Hitherto we have been so intent on the trail that we have not stopped to consider what it all meant. Now that we know, not only our own salvation seems threatened, but that of all around us, even the integrity of the world itself. In these moments of perplexity and alarm, we lose confidence in ourselves and all our values and interpretations. To go further seems to be to court despair. We are ashamed to retreat, and, besides, have come too far ever to get back into the safe plain of ignorance again. The world seems to be revealed to us as mechanical in its workings and fortuitous in its origin, and the warmth and light of beauty and ideals that we have known all along to be our true life seem to be proven illusions. And the wailing of the world comes up to us, cast off from any divine assistance, left to the mercy of its own weak wills and puny strengths. In this fall, our world itself seems to have lost merit, and we feel ourselves almost degraded by being a part of it. We have suddenly been deprived of our souls; the world seems to have beaten us in our first real battle with it.

Now this despair is partly the result of an excessive responsibility that we have taken for the universe. In youth, if we are earnest and eager, we tend to take every bit of experience that comes to us, as either a justification or a condemnation of the world. We are all instinctive monists at that age, and crave a complete whole. As we unconsciously construct our philosophy of life, each fact gets automatically recorded as confirming or denying the competency of the world we live in. Even the first shock of disillusionment, which banishes those dreams of a beautiful, orderly, and rational world that had suffused childhood with their golden light, did not shatter the conviction that there was somehow at least a Lord’s side. The sudden closing of the account in the second shock, when the world turns on us, shows us how mighty has been the issue at stake,—nothing less than our faith in the universe, and, perhaps, in the last resort, of our faith in ourselves. We see now that our breathless seriousness of youth was all along simply a studying of our crowded experience to see whether it was on the Lord’s side or not. And now in our doubt we are left with a weight on our souls which is not our own, a burden which we have really usurped.

In its adventure with evil, youth must not allow this strange, metaphysical responsibility to depress and incapacitate it. We shall never face life freely and bravely and worthily if we do. I may wonder, it is true, as I look out on these peaceful fields, with the warm sun and blue sky above me and the kindly faces of my good friends around me, how this can be the same world that houses the millions of poor and wretched people in their burning and huddled quarters in the city. Can these days, in which I am free to come and go and walk and study as I will, be the same that measure out the long hours of drudgery to thousands of youth amid the whir of machines, and these long restful nights of mine, the same that are for them only gasps breaking a long monotony? It must be the same world, however, whether we can ever reconcile ourselves to it or not. But we need plainly feel no responsibility for what happened previously to our generation. Our responsibility now is a collective, a social responsibility. And it is only for the evil that society might prevent were it organized wisely and justly. Beyond that it does not go. For the accidental evil that is showered upon the world, we are not responsible, and we need not feel either that the integrity of the universe is necessarily compromised by it. It is necessary to be somewhat self-centred in considering it. We must trust our own feelings rather than any rational proof. In spite of everything, the world seems to us so unconquerably good, it affords so many satisfactions, and is so rich in beauty and kindliness, that we have a right to assume that there is a side of things that we miss in our pessimistic contemplation of misfortune and disaster. We see only the outer rind of it. People usually seem to be so much happier than we can find any very rational excuse for their being, and that old world that confronted us and scared us may look very much worse than it really is. And we can remember that adding to the number of the sufferers does not intensify the actual quality of the suffering. There is no more suffering than one person can bear.