Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants the popular market; the quality of his bent precludes that for the present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight line between the thought and the utterance.

A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the run of thought, the better the work.

One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a continual changing and refining production about our truest friends—the same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest—that quickens us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in our breast—it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have arrived somewhere—in profession, in trade, in world-standing—know that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is dissolute.

I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to come—but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well already—arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage—that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.

"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or soul—conditions that are invoking to great reaches of consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man is ever a hushed whisper.

"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.

"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain. It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of, as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind, and the rain beating upon the roof....

"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed.... It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro. It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank, lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact, during the dream I had hardly a sense of being, except through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark, a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do, since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent, except when a larger form instilled me with fear.