The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers

by Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

Those of us, however, who cannot all at once throw off the thrall of the poor old poets of our infancy must be content to go a bit slowly, trusting that our descendants will attain complete responsiveness to the poetry of the evanescent. We perceive humbly enough how reactionary we are, but our obstreperous instinct for explanation corrupts even our literary tenets so that with senile obstinacy we sometimes wonder whether, even from its own purely æsthetic point of view, the new poetry does not miss something the older poetry possessed. Meaning, adroitly introduced into a poem, sometimes produced a pretty little art of its own, a blending of outer and inner attributes that had in itself a kind of grace. It is even more heterodox to question, in looking back, whether a poet’s effort to explain was not stimulating to his imagination, making him actually see things more vividly in their external aspects by his very concentration on their inner qualities. Certainly no imagist poet, for all his preoccupation with picture, has ever produced as vivid descriptions as did Browning, a poet above all others avid for meanings.

We of to-day may as well acknowledge first as last that our feet, set in infancy to the pace of eternity, will never step lively enough for the present age. While deprecating the breathlessness of keeping up with the contemporary, the most old-fashioned of us must admire its valiancy. We are not nearly so lazy as when we used to leave some of our development to be accomplished after the temporary set-back of death. Our own muscles are a bit stiff, however, and as we conscientiously whip them to the requirements of high-speed pressure, we must comfort ourselves with the thought that our posterity will be able to fly without experiencing any of our awkwardness.

The spiritual leisure and lethargy resulting from a reliance on eternity to finish up what we could not get done on earth, obviously clogged the wheels of progress, which now can be everywhere seen whizzing along without any brakes. We open the advertising pages of any periodical, to find that speed is the dominant advantage offered with every commodity. Get-healthy-quick, get-learned-quick, get-rich-quick, are the headings under which most of our advertisements might be grouped. We are all familiar with the photographed faces of the people who will show us how to reach a maximum of attainment in a minimum of time. The gentleman with the arresting index finger leaps out at our laziness to teach us how to be successful in ten lessons. Success is a word that could not even be defined before the abolishment of eternity, with the resultant denial of all criteria but the immediate.

While haste is necessarily painful for our still imperfectly adjusted mentality in every department of life, we must allow for our being peculiarly sensitive to the changes it necessitates in the training of youth. In the old days when death graduated us into eternity, we had much more time to devote to education. There was in our early years an agreeable luxury in the pursuit of learning. We did not have to practice the rigid economy of the correspondence school or of languages by phonograph. As we look back, it seems as if minds were richer when they did not have to be so niggardly in the luggage they took for their journey. This is but the sentimental vaporing of the senile, for in our sane moments we perceive as clearly as does the most modern pedagogue that Greek and Latin are impedimenta to retard the boy of to-day in the race set before him, and we agree with the publisher-purveyors to youth that the compendia of useful knowledge furnished by them offer the handiest possible canned nutriment for a period that has time only for acquisition, not for digestion.

As regards the study of the classics, we did not at first perceive that to annul the future involved annulling the past, and yet, practically, giving up eternity has undermined our interest in history. Conviction of mortality enjoins the conscience to concentrate on the contemporary so intensely that past events become obscure. Unless we have eternity before us we really have no time to look behind. Yet some of us have a yearning for history that used to find satisfaction in fancying that our little age fitted into a sequence of ages. It contributed to a false but agreeable complacency to gaze back into an endless past as it did to gaze forward into an endless future. Of course, abolishing eternity does not necessarily obliterate the past or explicitly forbid our going back there to visit; it merely makes to-day so important that we have no time whatever for yesterday.

In this matter of educational adjustment, as in others, a transitional period suffers enough to permit itself a little humoring of its prejudices; we should not attach too much guilt to a surreptitious enjoyment of the ancients so long as we do not corrupt the youth of our acquaintance by teaching them any of our respect for antique art. So long as we are doing our conscientious best to free our boys and girls from the cumbersomeness of a classic education, we may feel that we have done our duty, and may indulge a secret delight in the dusty shelves that reveal to us the grace that was Greece and the glory that was Rome. It is all right so long as we don’t let the children know, for that bygone beauty is strangely seductive and glamorous, and contact with it might sap their energy in pursuing fortune and fame and food, which should be the sole preoccupation of people appointed to die.

Indisputably speed must be the desideratum of all activity, educational or other. Now the chief distress we older ones experience from speed is not that it leads to success, but that so often it leads nowhere. The old-fashioned custom of having a purpose in a pursuit makes it difficult for us to enjoy pure giddiness as heartily as do our younger contemporaries. Haste, first introduced as a method of extracting from the temporary what eternity used to supply, has become an end in itself, so that a great many people ask nothing else of life but to feel themselves whizzing. Since nothing is permanent except impermanence, the one thing to do is to go spinning along, cautious only to avoid bumping into a destination. As a consequence of trying to catch up in one lifetime with all the activity of eternity, we have acquired such exhilaration, such momentum of energy, that there is nothing we are so afraid of as the impact of arriving somewhere. The profession of flux as a creed necessitates the practice of flying as a habit. Yet with this very profession of faith I find I have arrived at a heresy.

Now this heresy consists of the argument plainly approved by pure logic that if the purpose of speed is to get the most out of this life because there is no other, then no movement at all is exactly as rational as too much, and we have a perfect right to select any spot of our mental landscape that suits us and sit down on it, convinced that it is just as sensible to get our money’s worth out of life’s little day by being stationary as by being giddy. On the principle that ephemeral beings have a right to any fun they can find is founded the advice to our age toward which this entire discussion has been directed. Baldly stated, the proposal is this: the best way of doing without eternity is to pretend we don’t have to! The suggestion is frankly so absurd that any reader is permitted to smile at it as freely as does the writer. We have lost eternity and we can’t bring it back by pretending it is still there. The point is that we don’t want to bring it back, but we do want to discover some way of being comfortable without it. Believing that there is no eternity, but living as if there were, is not a process possible to all persons, and is therefore urged only upon those capable of so separating their reason and their imagination that the two can function independently of each other. Many people are happily thus constituted, and still more can become so if they try. There is, moreover, no real sin in the course, because we are rather true to our imaginations than false to our convictions, and, besides, we do no proselyting; we merely allow our own fancy the refreshment of revisiting our lost fairyland.

The chief obstacle to the compromise is that its absurdity is exactly balanced by its efficacy; in other words, you can’t tell how good it will feel until you try it, and if you are an over-rational and over-conscientious person you will think it beneath your dignity to try it. Yet actually there is nothing that contributes so much toward a sense of well-being as pretending, for a few minutes every day,—say just before getting up in the morning and just before going to sleep at night,—that you are going to live after you die.

After a few weeks of this exercise, that embarrassment we experience in the presence of nature becomes less painful, whereas, when we are too acutely conscious of mortality, we are shamed by an insensate oak, by a rock we could pound to powder for its silent sneer at our evanescence. If we make believe we are as good as they are, we can hold up our heads to the sky and the stars, and even venture to penetrate the social exclusiveness of the sky and the mountains. A man who pretends he is immortal is not so deafened by the cannon of the contemporary that he cannot hear the still, sweet voices of the little flowers. An association with the ancient aristocracy of sea and forest is good for a person, but it is almost impossible to feel at ease in this society unless we temporarily assume an equality with it in permanence.