Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times a great calm, another dimension of calm entirely from that which has to do with animal peace and repletion. It is the peace of intensive production—and the spectacle of it is best seen when you lift the super from a hive of bees, the spirit of which animates every moving creature to one constructive end. That which emanates from this intensity of action is calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does not have to sink into a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest have more to do with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of tissue one tears down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done. Absolutely this is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work a man loves replenishes.

Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying than to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm of his task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so continually tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold this rhythm, we could not die.

This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full exercise—soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a song from it—that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have heard from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all selfless productivity.

One cannot play until one has worked—that is the whole truth. Ask that restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to polish the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless cleanliness in a room. Hold the picture of what you want in mind and detail it to him, saying that you will come again and inspect his work. Watch, if you care, the mystery of it. There will be silence until the thing begins to unfold for him—until the polish comes to wood or metal, until the thing begins to answer and the picture of completion bursts upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a hum, and nothing will break his theme until the end.

The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean things; that the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested when one enters a clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't the room, after all, that gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle or the hum comes from harmony within.

A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he "climbed out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from softening and cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon showing his work.

Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as life-quests—except for the few consummately adapted players whose little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized rectangle—the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed, and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.

A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he loves best to do—constructive play—giving play to his powers, bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan, yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake; the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper, the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass above—that fallow lands are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out like a wine, and decide there is something in it.

There is something in everything.

The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get this—if it ever comes to us—and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he heard his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to bring out.