Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools and materials in black and white—just intimations.... If we are sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two words suggest it best. The first is Comrade, which has become a silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the years—or avoided using it—until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear—its meaning in work and world and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.
It seems to say Equality. It's a kind of deep drink of spirit together, a word spoken at the last moment between men—an inner-shrine word, spoken with a smile, and a glimpse into the eternal indestructibility of the human heart. It expresses the love of the world, not as it is felt in the brain, but in the breast of the soul. The New Race has already washed it clean. It goes with a Cause fit to die for. It belongs to men and women who can look at each other with a kind of prayer in their eyes and face death alone and laugh at it.
There's a fury, too, in the word—fury against the world, against things as they are. It stands against the world-darkness now, and for the day that is to be. It means love for the poor, a love for the peasants, a passion to serve and be tender to them, not to drive them into the pits of death—a readiness to die for them without cant, a readiness also to dare to live for them.
Comrade—there's vision in it to strip off the masks of decadent nations, to open wide the sepulchres where the priests are still plotting to crucify the King; its strong magic will uncover the monotonous crimes of commerce.... It signifies the spirit of the young men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear the débris for the building of the New Age.
They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the soil and the rivers and snows—to build upon them the new heaven and the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word—the laugh of youth and power.
The other word is Democracy.
5
JOHN'S THINGS