The Ignominy of Being Grown-up
As I have already intimated, my greatest intellectual privilege is my acquaintance with a philosopher. He is not one of those unsocial philosophers who put their best thoughts into books to be kept in cold storage for posterity. My Philosopher is eminently social, and is conversational in his method. He belongs to the ancient school of the Peripatetics, and the more rapidly he is moving the more satisfactory is the flow of his ideas.
He is a great believer in the Socratic method. He feels that a question is its own excuse for being. The proper answer to a question is not a stupid affirmation that would close the conversation, but another question. The questions follow one another with extreme rapidity. He acts upon my mind like an air pump. His questions speedily exhaust my small stock of acquired information. Into the mental vacuum thus produced rush all sorts of irrelevant ideas, which we proceed to share. In this way there comes a sense of intellectual comradeship which one does not have with most philosophers.
For four years my Philosopher has been interrogating Nature, and he has not begun to exhaust the subject. Though he has accumulated a good deal of experience, he is still in his intellectual prime. He has not yet reached the "school age," which in most persons marks the beginning of the senile decay of the poetic imagination.
In my walks and talks with my Philosopher I have often been amazed at my own limitations. Things which are so easy for him are so difficult for me. Particularly is this the case in regard to the more fundamental principles of philosophy. All philosophy, as we know, is the search for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These words represent only the primary colors of the moral spectrum. Each one is broken up into any number of secondary colors. Thus the Good ranges all the way from the good to eat to the good to sacrifice one's self for; the Beautiful ascends from the most trifling prettiness to the height of the spiritually sublime; while the True takes in all manner of verities, great and small. In comparing notes with my Philosopher I am chagrined at my own color-blindness. He recognizes so many superlative excellences to which I am stupidly oblivious.
In one of our walks we stop at the grocer's, I having been asked to fill the office of domestic purveyor. It is a case where the office has sought the man, and not the man the office. Lest we forget, everything has been written down so that a wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein,—baking-powder and coffee and a dozen eggs, and last and least, and under no circumstances to be forgotten, a cake of condensed yeast. These things weigh upon my spirits. The thought of that little yeastcake shuts out any disinterested view of the store. It is nothing to me but a prosaic collection of the necessaries of life. I am uncheered by any sense of romantic adventure.
Not so with my Philosopher. He is in the rosy dawn of expectation. The doors are opened, and he enters into an enchanted country. His eyes grow large as he looks about him. He sees visions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in all their bewildering, concrete variety. They are in barrels and boxes and paper bundles. They rise toward the sky in shelves that reach at last the height of the gloriously unattainable. He walks through the vales of Arcady, among pickles and cheeses. He lifts up his eyes wonderingly to snowy Olympus crowned with Pillsbury's Best. He discovers a magic fountain, not spurting up as if it were but for a moment, but issuing forth with the mysterious slowness that befits the liquefactions of the earlier world. "What is that?" he asks, and I can hardly frame the prosaic word "Molasses."