Throughout the whole second half of the nineteenth century “to read [John] Ruskin was accepted as proof of the possession of a soul.” So the great art historian Kenneth Clark once put it.

Ranking high among the eminent figures of the Victorian age, Ruskin was a man of many passions: poet, artist, critic, teacher, social reformer, and early conservationist. He stood staunchly against the dehumanizing effects of England’s Industrial Revolution, defending the human dignity of the laborer and celebrating the “nobility” of “unrefined” objects manufactured by the skill of humans rather than machines. These man-made objects, he insisted, “bring out the whole mind” and “the finer nature” of the laborer. In contrast was the machine-made product, which asked nothing of the workman’s soul but that he subordinate himself to the laws of the assembly line—hence: ugly, soulless, mass-produced items, and human workers degraded to automatons.

To Ruskin, labor and art need not be polarized as the ethos of the modern factory would have it. Rather, labor should be more than a matter of economy, and art more than a matter of taste. Both should coalesce in expression of the vitality, inventiveness, heart, thought, and spirit of humanity. How’s that for big dreaming?

Actually, given Ruskin’s powers of eloquence, it all amounted to far more than mere fancy. Thanks in no small part to his preachments, the dynamic Arts & Crafts movements emerged in England and America, mini-Renaissances of a kind. And as Kenneth Clark notes,

The influence of Ruskin’s ideas on social reform has been immense. Most of the changes which he advocated—free schools, free libraries, town planning, smokeless zones, green belts—are now taken for granted. … Today his thoughts influence the lives of millions.”

(Among Ruskin’s latter day admirers was Mahatma Ghandi, who professed a huge debt to the Victorian’s influence.)

A society expresses itself and its values in what it produces, most notably in its architecture and spirit of design. As Joseph Campbell observed,

You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace … And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.”

Ruskin’s writing is at its most vibrant when he gets going on this inseparability of what we are from what we make.

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both,” he writes in The Stones of Venice (1853).

We’re in prime Soul Shelter territory here.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in the world is concerned. …

On the other hand, if you will make a man of the living creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them. …”

I love Ruskin’s whole-hearted embrace of imperfectibility here. It is not efficiency nor “engine-turned precision,” nor speed nor unerring calculation that characterizes a human soul, but “roughness,” “dullness,” “pause after pause.” Humans are a motley bunch. We resist programming. And these traits go hand-in-hand with human “majesty.”

Now there’s some food for thought in our present digital age, which would have us prize the smooth and smoothly functional, the shiny, the “hi-res,” and the lightning-quick—capacities all patently unhuman.

Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.

Ruskin’s main subject here—the European gothic age—occasions his commentary upon the industrialized Victorian world around him. In the best gothic cathedrals he sees an age that values, in ways both broadly cultural and personal, individual creativity, eccentricity, and craftsmanship.

The laborer is an artist and the artist a laborer. Labor and art are both desired by society—man and man’s spirit, vision and product.

For contrast Ruskin levels his gaze on a contemporary England where ignoble labor systems suppress the human spirit, drain the dignity from work, and breed unnecessary shame and shallow desires in the exhausted worker:

… It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means to pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. …This, nature bade not,—this, God blesses not,—this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labor; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. …

…We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

Ruskin wants the best and most vibrant part of a person to find natural expression in that person’s work. Consequently the work itself may be said to live, and in turn the work gives life to the worker—life, that is, in a form more significant than mere money for house and bread.

Returning to the subject of imperfectibility, Ruskin drives home with a poet’s persuasiveness the rightness, the needfulness, of the human imprint in whatever a human makes.

It is in laying the handprint of our soul upon things that we stay fully human and fully alive. If misguided ideals of progress, efficiency, profit, or perfectibility lead us to wipe this handprint clear, or to cherish whatever is sleek, robotic, and notably inhuman as the final aim of all our enterprise, we are in danger of giving up the nobler expressions of the human spirit, and thus endangering our souls.

…No good work whatever can be perfect. …[for] no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it. …

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. …In all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

It is the soul’s business to strive toward expression, and maybe the soul’s greatest expression comes through imperfection nobly embraced, and through valuing in others what is imperfectly beautiful, what is beautifully imperfect—in a word, what is human.

(Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic” in its entirety is published in this book. )

This post is an installment of CommonSensical.

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Back in 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history’s most cogent apologias on the subject “Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being.”

To Mill’s view, mass opinion (what we might call “mass culture” these days), is an undeniable blight to individuality, and therefore directly threatens freedoms civic and intellectual, cultural, and democratic.

While explicitly political, Mill’s argument reaches down to the foundations of human nature and culture, articulating many of the challenges we face in a new, media-driven society fixated upon dollars earned, hits per day, and “going viral.”

As explained by the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature:

On Liberty is not a traditional liberal attack against tyrannical kings or dictators; it is an attack against tyrannical majorities. Mill foresaw that in democracies such as the United States, the pressure toward conformity might crush all individualists (intellectual individualists in particular) to the level of what he called a “collective mediocrity.

Herewith, a sampling from On Liberty, Chapter Three. Mill, of course, is writing about Victorian England, but at his full-throated best he gives us many a parallel to the mass culture America of today:

No one’s idea of excellence in conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing but copy one another.

…To conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in [a person] any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. …

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. …

I like how Mill acknowledges here, in the packed space of a small paragraph, the almost unthinkable difficulty of being a non-conformist: you’ve gotta be observant, he says, and reasonable, and judicious, and active, and discriminating, and decisive, and firm, and self-controlled, and deliberate. As personal characteristics go, that’s one tall order. And even then the pressure of the times, preferring mass appeal, is going to oppose you at every step.

But, says Mill, the force of one’s inherent character is not to be suppressed, for…

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. …

The danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences. … In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual and the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine?

Such lines of thought became known in modern times as “keeping up with the Jonses.” (Anybody use that idiom anymore?)

As for Mill’s point about one’s tendency to censor oneself, I’m reminded of Ray Bradbury’s famously portentous quip: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Mill continues:

I do not mean that [individuals] choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds. …

Well now, that’s putting it bluntly! Yet in light of Mill’s make-no-bones perspective, we might challenge ourselves by asking: What are bestseller lists, blockbuster movies, Billboard charts, Oprah endorsements, primetime hits, etc., but symptoms (however benign and excusable) of what Mill calls “the mind bowed to the yoke”? — that is, things we like because, first of all, other people have liked them.

Commerce obtrudes upon culture, and all is fine and well to a degree—until, in Mill’s terms, the commercial majority tramples down individual taste.

They exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature? …

Many persons, no doubt, sincerely think that human beings thus cramped and dwarfed are as their Maker designed them to be; just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them. But if it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good Being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capacities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment. …

It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to. In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them. …

Let’s pause to revisit those two incredible sentences. Each an ode to the value and benefits of idiosyncrasy, each is certainly worth inscribing in memory:

1) “As the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating.”

2) “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.”

To give any fair play to the nature of [the units and the mass in a culture], it is essential that different persons should be allowed to lead different lives. In proportion as this latitude has been exercised in any age, has that age been noteworthy to posterity. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men. …

Can mass culture, then, equate to a form of despotism? We rarely think of the matter in these terms, but Mill, a century and a half before us, was unafraid to do so. And maybe his notion holds today—particularly if we consider the lack of material encouragement and assistance our culture offers the arts and humanities.

As John Gardner once put it, “In America, though federal, state, and local governments make feeble gestures of support (the whole National Endowment for the Arts comes to, I think, the cost of one frigate), it seems clear that nobody quite knows what to do with artists.”

Mill again:

There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire. Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.

But today, to take artists for an example, we may repeatedly notice the effects of Mill’s “tyrannical majority” where “unpopular,” as we use the term, often means more precisely “uncommercial.” A book is judged uncommerical by the publisher’s sales force, or a movie judged uncommercial (“low-concept” as they say) by its production company: These works thereby become predestined to unpopularity.

In a better, more truly pluralistic culture of individuality, a culture in which “peculiarity of taste and eccentricity of conduct” were alive in audience, artist, and marketer alike, being at odds with commerce would not expressly doom a work to unpopularity.

Now Mill gives us three paragraphs meriting invocation in any coherent argument for improved arts funding:

Persons of genius are, ex vi termini [“by force of the term”], more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small molds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character. If from timidity they consent to be forced into one of these molds, and to let all that part of themselves which cannot expand under the pressure remain unexpanded, society will be little the better for their genius. If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as ‘wild,’ ‘erratic,’ and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara River for not flowing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.

I insist thus emphatically on the importance of genius, and the necessity of allowing it to unfold itself freely both in thought and in practice, being well aware that no one will deny the position in theory, but knowing also that almost everyone, in reality, is totally indifferent to it. …

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality. The first service which originality has to render them is that of opening their eyes: which being once fully done, they would have a chance of being themselves original. …

And now we’re brought home to an answer as to why eccentricity is in fact desirable and commendable, no matter how little cash it may earn you:

The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honor and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open.

…When the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would be the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these circumstances most especially that exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass. … Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportioned to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

… It was men of another stamp than this that made England [read: America] what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline. …

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Last week I presented some ideas concerning restriction as a creative catalyst, and touched upon the writings of John Dewey (1859-1952), one of the finest intellects this country ever produced.

Dewey was the rare sort of soul whose scope of achievement seems wholly the product of genius born into an earlier and more salutary age. He was a preeminent university educator for most of his adult life, a major philosophical influence on American pedagogy, an accomplished psychologist, an authoritative social commentator and Humanist spokesman, and a highly effective political activist. It’s enough to boggle the mind of contemporary admirers.

Somehow, Dewey also managed to compose some of the most adroit and eloquent writing in the “side area” of aesthetics, and it’s here that he had much to say about the paradoxical benefits, in creative terms, of a somewhat blocked creative expression. Last week I wrote:

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

John Dewey would concur. In fact, I was basically paraphrasing the man.

And today I’d like to share some selected excerpts from Dewey’s great work Art As Experience (1934).

Instead of “restriction,” Dewey’s keyword is “resistance.”

“Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—whether through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed.

Dewey refers to biology and the adaptive processes of living creatures in order to argue the usefulness of resistance. It’s a good frame of reference, and gets one thinking positively about resistance as imperative to personal and creative growth and evolution.

However, because I’m excerpting selectively here, I should make clear that Dewey’s analogy is not meant to point out the ruthlessness required for survival of the fittest, nor the merits of Social Darwinism — nothing of the kind. Rather, in truer Dewey manner, the subject here is the mysterious, unexpected ways our creativity is enhanced or reduced in the face of certain inevitable forces (the day job, the dishes, distractions), and thus the ways our ideas succeed or fail to come to full fruition. In the following passages we could substitute “creativity” for “life” and cut to the analogy’s chase.

If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life [creativity] grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives….

If life [creativity] continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life [creativity]. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. …Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, because of, tension.

Granted, too much resistance can prove harmful, but medium-size tension can be a good thing. If the resistance we face is not completely obstructive, and we’re allowed to make steady, incremental progress toward our creative ideal, we may ultimately find ourselves arrived at what Dewey calls “a more extensive balance … a more significant life.”

Pushing through resistance, our ideas get toned up, driven to evolve into something better, more creative, and more robust, somewhat in the way a body grows immune to disease by low-level exposure. The ideas’ final execution may altogether outshine our original concepts. What’s more, we may find that the whole process of germination, resistance, and achievement has taken us to new personal and creative heights.

Strange as it seems, a creative undertaking — whatever it is, so long as it is serious — will likely profit from influences reasonably adverse to its expression (the day-job, etc.). In fact, Dewey sees resistance, and the surmounting of it by the creative soul, as aspects of a simple natural rhythm — the yin and yang, or perhaps winter and summer, of existence — and indispensable to a fulfilling life experience. Too much won too easily rarely satisfies, as many a morality tale has told us.

The rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union not only persists in man but becomes conscious with him; its conditions are material out of which he forms purposes. … Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. …

Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment after consummated irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one. The outcome is balance and counterbalance. These are not static nor mechanical. They express power that is intense because measured through overcoming resistance. …

…A world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict. Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and re-establishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. …

And yet, of course, having pushed through all obstacles and ushered a creative work into existence, we learn anew that the natural rhythm of germination and resistance must continue. We see that engaging this process (“not shunning moments of resistance and tension”), and growing in our most meaningful work over time, is the stuff of a fulfilling life.

The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew. Any attempt to perpetuate beyond its term the enjoyment attending the time of fulfillment and harmony constitutes withdrawal from the world. Hence it marks the lowering and loss of vitality. But, through the phases of perturbation and conflict, there abides the deep-seated memory of an underlying harmony, the sense of which haunts life like the sense of being founded on a rock. …

And now monsieur Dewey gets downright poetic:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. …Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates opposition and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.

There is no art without the composure that corresponds to design and composition in the object. But there is also none without resistance, tension, and excitement; otherwise the calm induced is not one of fulfillment.

Artists and creatives: give thanks for the eloquent insight of John Dewey. Fear not resistance. Harness it if you can. And keep working.

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If you own things, what’s their effect on you?

So asked the English writer E.M. Forster in his 1926 essay “My Wood.” Forster’s whimsical commentary can be viewed as a precursor of today’s back-to-basics simplicity movement. Such precursors endure in the works of many great writers and poets — Henry David Thoreau (“Simplify, simplify!“), Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, and E.E. Cummings, to name a few. Literature, after all, is about the examined life.

E.M. Forster was the author of numerous novels including A Room with a View, Howard’s End, and A Passage to India. The latter was his most well known. A commercial success in Forster’s time, the novel earned him royalties enough to buy his first section of land, “a wood” as he calls it in British style.

It is not a large wood — it contains scarcely any trees, and it is intersected, blast it, by a public foot-path. Still, it is the first property that I have owned, so it is right that other people should participate in my shame, and should ask themselves, in accents that will vary in horror, this very important question: What is the effect of property upon the character? Don’t let’s touch economics; the effect of private ownership upon the community as a whole is another question — a more important question, perhaps, but another one. Let’s keep to psychology. If you own things, what’s their effect on you? What’s the effect on me of my wood?

Forster enumerates four specific effects (set apart in red throughout the following):

In the first place, it makes me feel heavy. Property does have this effect. Property produces men of weight, and it was a man of weight who failed to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. He was not wicked, that unfortunate millionaire in the parable, he was only stout; he stuck out in front, not to mention behind, and as he wedged himself this way and that in the crystalline entrance and bruised his well-fed flanks, he saw beneath him a comparatively slim camel passing through the eye of a needle and being woven into the robe of God. The Gospels all through couple stoutness and slowness. They point out what is perfectly obvious, yet seldom realized: that if you have a lot of things you cannot move about a lot, that furniture requires dusting, dusters require servants, servants require insurance stamps, and the whole tangle of them makes you think twice before you accept an invitation to dinner or go for a bathe in the Jordan. Sometimes the Gospels proceed further and say with Tolstoy that property is sinful; they approach the difficult ground of asceticism here, where I cannot follow them. But as to the immediate effects of property on people, they just show straightforward logic. It produces men of weight. Men of weight cannot, by definition, move like the lightning from the East unto the West, and the ascent of a fourteen-stone bishop into a pulpit is thus the exact antithesis of the coming of the Son of Man. My wood makes me feel heavy.

But curiously, even while feeling how the little woodlot weighs him down, Forster senses another illogical, seemingly contradictory, but undeniable effect.

In the second place, it makes me feel it ought to be larger.

What follows is his funniest and most insightful paragraph, which begs the question: Can a person really own anything at all, especially a plot of something as alive and boundless as nature itself?

The other day I heard a twig snap in [my wood]. I was annoyed at first, for I thought that someone was blackberrying, and depreciating the value of the undergrowth. On coming nearer, I saw it was not a man who had trodden on the twig and snapped it, but a bird, and I felt pleased. My bird. The bird was not equally pleased. Ignoring the relation between us, it took flight as soon as it saw the shape of my face, and flew straight over the boundary hedge into a field, the property of Mrs. Henessy, where it sat down with a loud squawk. It had become Mrs. Henessy’s bird. Something seemed grossly amiss here, something that would not have occurred had the wood been larger. I could not afford to buy Mrs. Henessy out, I dared not murder her, and limitations of this sort beset me on every side. … Nor was I comforted when Mrs. Henessy’s bird took alarm for the second time and flew clean away from us all, under the belief that it belonged to itself.

Those of us who are not ranchers or farmers tend to presume that a person buys property in order to feel happy and at home somewhere, to have a place of retreat promising ease and comfort. But of course, as anyone who’s owned a house will concur (and count me among these homeowners), with property comes the burden of never-ending maintenance. And even in those scarce hours when all seems shipshape, when the leaky pipe has been plumbed and the gutters cleaned and the floors swept or vacuumed — even then, the property owner finds it hard to relax, because, as Forster says:

In the third place, property makes its owner feel that he ought to do something to it. Yet he isn’t sure what. A restlessness comes over him, a vague sense that he has a personality to express — the same sense which, without any vagueness, leads the artist to an act of creation. Sometimes I think I will cut down such trees as remain in the wood, at other times I want to fill up the gaps between them with new trees. Both impulses are pretentious and empty. They are not honest movements towards moneymaking or beauty. They spring from a foolish desire to express myself and from an inability to enjoy what I have got. Creation, property, enjoyment form a sinister trinity in the human mind. Creation and enjoyment are both very, very good, yet they are often unattainable without a material basis, and at such moments property pushes itself in as a substitute, saying, “Accept me instead — I’m good enough for all three.” It is not enough. It is, as Shakespeare said of lust, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”: it is “Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.” Yet we don’t know how to shun it. It is forced on us by our economic system as the alternative to starvation. It is also forced on us by an internal defect in the soul, by the feeling that in property may lie the germs of self-development and of exquisite or heroic deeds. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership, where (in the words of Dante) “Possession is one with loss.”

His observations here are analogous to Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Mending Wall,” where the poet’s neighbor insists that “good fences make good neighbors.” With our property delineated by boundaries, what do we “wall out”? In our acquisition, what do we lose?

And this brings us to our fourth and final point: the blackberries.

Blackberries are not plentiful in this meager grove, but they are easily seen from the public footpath which traverses it, and all too easily gathered. …Pray, does my wood belong to me or doesn’t it? And, if it does, should I not own it best by allowing no one else to walk there? There is a wood near Lyme Regis, also cursed by a public footpath, where the owner has not hesitated on this point. He has built high stone walls each side of the path, and has spanned it by bridges, so that the public circulate like termites while he gorges on the blackberries unseen. He really does own his wood, this able chap. …

And now Forster, being the newly propertied man he is, forecasts his own eventual attitude about ownership. He imagines he’ll become shamelessly similar to that miserly property owner he mentions. Where is the promised sweetness and pleasure in owning property? Satirizing the miser, Forster astutely demonstrates that outer things rarely bring inner rewards. One must cease searching outwardly for the kind of wealth the soul can recognize, for in searching there one only tires and surrenders to bitterness. In the voice of the miser, Forster concludes:

I shall wall in and fence out until I really taste the sweets of property. Enormously stout, endlessly avaricious, pseudo-creative, intensely selfish, I shall weave upon my forehead the quadruple crown of possession until those nasty Bolshies come and take it off again and thrust me aside into the outer darkness.

Can property be a good thing? Maybe even bring a person joy of a kind? Absolutely. As one who feels blessed to have a house and backyard, I don’t deny this, and I imagine Forster wouldn’t either. Nonetheless, we do well to bear in mind the observations in “My Wood” (which just reiterate wisdom of ages prior). The accumulation of property cannot bring inward peace or happiness. Indeed, as acquisitions increase it grows proportionally more difficult to avoid Forster’s described heaviness and restlessness, and to retain a fellow-feeling toward those around us.

“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.” — Henry David Thoreau

Read “My Wood” in its entirety here.

(Note: Next Monday’s special guest post will also take up the topic of simplicity.)

You may also enjoy:

“Why Your Home is a Liability”

“How to Have Less and Enjoy More”

“How Much is Enough?”

“Let Us Begin“

Envisioning and designing the University of Virginia in his later years, Thomas Jefferson imagined a haven of higher learning where students could come and go at will, seeking whatever knowledge they pleased and laboring under no expectation to earn a degree. In fact, degrees would not even be offered. It was to be a Utopian bastion of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Back in my days of institutional higher learning I was a student in the Jeffersonian mode (though I didn’t even know it). I hungered for knowledge but never really cared about obtaining a degree. Not a few of my elder relations and teachers chafed at this academic lassitude of mine, and amid our culture’s attitudes about university attendance I felt myself being branded an underachiever and pushed out of the system. Only the career-minded need apply. I never did acquire the coveted, gold-embossed, frameable, cardstock certificate.

Ultimately, despite the social pressure to either a) proceed lock-step along the academic path or b) admit myself a wash-up in the gutters of higher learning, my reasons for resigning my university career and not seeking a degree were my own. Maybe I was a young kook, but I came to believe that knowledge and culture could be found all around me at relatively little or no monetary cost (primarily through libraries, conversation, and travel), whereas a full and formal college education was sure to set me on a lifelong path of debt. I figured my self-expansion and edification could happen more economically and more effectively on my own terms and by my own methods of inquiry. I sought the most liberal of liberal arts education.

Maybe I’m still a kook, because now, years later, my convictions about the ready availability of knowledge remain pretty much unchanged. Devoid of a degree as I am, I have never stopped reading, inquiring, and exploring the world of ideas and facts. All this is not to deny, of course, that formal education is good in its way (and naturally some specialties — law and medicine most notably — absolutely require old-fashioned collegiate training). But I still believe deeply in the worth and merit of impractical learning — that is, learning not yoked with any particular worldly ambition — and I wish that this kind of “aimless” learning could find better cultural legitimacy.

In 1892 the thirty-four-year-old poet and classical scholar, A.E. Housman (1859-1936), gave a lively, stylish lecture on the subject of why human beings seek knowledge. It’s the best defense of “aimless” learning I’ve ever read. Here follows an inexcusably brief abridgment.

Housman kicks off with a retort to a contemporary writer who “define[s] the aim of learning to be utility,” and thus science to be the single most desirable subject of learning. Ah, but can any one type of knowledge really hold the claim of being better, or more beneficial, than another?

The popular view…is that the aim of acquiring knowledge is to equip one’s self for the business of life; that accordingly the knowledge most to be sought after is the knowledge which equips one best; and that this knowledge is Science.

… In short, the fact is, that what man will seek to acquaint himself with in order to prepare him for securing the necessaries of life is not Science, but the indispensable minimum of Science.

… In addition to the initial studies of reading, writing and arithmetic, [a person] needs to acquaint himself…with the indispensable minimum of those sciences which concern the trade or the art he earns his bread by: the dyer with chemistry, the carpenter with geometry, the navigator with astronomy. But there he can stop.

… A life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily. …Our true occupation is to manufacture from the raw material of life the fabric of happiness.

… The acquisition of knowledge needs no…justification: its true sanction is a much simpler affair, and inherent in itself. People are too prone to torment themselves with devising far-fetched reasons: they cannot be content with the simple truth asserted by Aristotle: `all men possess by nature a craving for knowledge.’ … This is no rare endowment scattered sparingly from heaven that falls on a few heads and passes others by: curiosity, the desire to know things as they are, is a craving no less native to the being of man, no less universal in diffusion through mankind, than the craving for food and drink. …The desire of knowledge does not need, nor could it possibly possess, any higher or more authentic sanction than the happiness which attends its gratification.

But now Housman pauses to acknowledge that “we see, every day of our lives, plenty of people who exhibit no pleasure in learning and experience no desire to know.” So is the human thirst for knowledge really as involuntary, and crucial to one’s survival, as one’s bodily thirst? Well, yes! The man who ignores his natural thirst for knowledge and chooses to wallow in ignorance may still appear to be a living, thriving human being, but…

…though the man does not die altogether, part of him dies, part of him starves to death: as Plato says, he never attains completeness and health, but walks lame to the end of his life and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.

But the desire of knowledge, stifle it though you may, is none the less originally born with every man; and nature does not implant desires for nothing, nor endow us with faculties in vain.

… The faculty of learning is ours that we may find in its exercise that delight which arises from the unimpeded activity of any energy in the groove nature meant it to run in. Let a man acquire knowledge not for this or that external and incidental good which may chance to result from it, but for itself; not because it is useful or ornamental, but because it is knowledge, and therefore good for man to acquire.

… For knowledge resembles virtue in this, and differs in this from other possessions, that it is not merely a means of procuring good, but is good in itself simply: it is not a coin which we pay down to purchase happiness, but it has happiness indissolubly bound up with it. …The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit of righteousness, is part of man’s duty to himself; and remember the Scripture where it is written `He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul’.

In fact, argues Housman, knowledge of some type will come to us all whether we like it or not — through the maturing process of passing years, through tragedy, through regret. This is the nature of life (“live and learn”). So is it not natural, then, to seek knowledge outright, and empower ourselves against avoidable regrets and mistakes?

It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them; just as there is less fear of stumbling or of striking against corners in the daylight than in the dark.

… The pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the years go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say `my mind to me a kingdom is’; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall.

Well then, once we have recognised that knowledge in itself is good for man, we shall need to invent no pretexts for studying this subject or that; we shall import no extraneous considerations of use or ornament to justify us in learning one thing rather than another. If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him.

(Here I’m reminded of a past discussion on this blog, in which Soul Shelter Director of Fortune Clark introduced (COOT^TM), Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory. Tim was confronting a reader’s question: ‘Is education always a good investment?’ His response? “No. But if you have serious thoughts about going back to school, that’s a powerful sign that it’s a very good idea for you.”)

…Other desires perish in their gratification, but the desire of knowledge never: the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. Other desires become the occasion of pain through dearth of the material to gratify them, but not the desire of knowledge: the sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read we shall never come to the end of our story-book.…

(Read Housman’s lecture in full, here.)

You might also enjoy:

“The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto”

“In Praise of Salaried Employment”

“Soul School“

(This is an installment of CommonSensical.)

David Foster Wallace, a talented fiction writer and essayist, died tragically a few weeks ago at age 46, a suicide. It’s impossible to know the kind of clinical angst Wallace must have suffered in order to make so horrific a final decision. The man’s work offers immense thoughtfulness and insight.

A cursory glance at Wallace’s writing appears to show a hyper-intellectual mind which probably regards faith as quaint and outmoded and any talk of the soul as either New-Agey or flattened by platitudes. Actually, Wallace used his prodigious powers of scrutiny in a mammoth attempt to peel away cliché, ingrained thought, or tried-and-true philosophies, all in the hope of achieving — truly achieving (and not merely taking it second-hand) — a real apprehension of Meaning. In other words, things like faith and the soul were important to him, as they are to any good writer. He believed we needn’t all be stuck inside our own heads.

These traits are evident in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. It’s a strange speech to give at a college graduation (although maybe not for Wallace). It meanders through the banalities of road rage at rush hour and shopping cart warfare at the local supermarket. But toward the conclusion something almost transcendent happens. Wallace provides powerful counsel regarding the importance of what we choose to “worship” in contemporary society, and the dangers of allowing intellectual habit to replace real thoughtfulness.

For today’s post I want to share the following remarkable excerpt from that speech. I believe readers will find it as moving as I do.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death…

(Read Wallace’s commencement address in its entirety here.)

You might also enjoy:

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

“Trust Thyself”

“The Happiness Issue“

The odds were against John Keats from the beginning. Orphaned as a small child, he grew up in poverty, had a scattershot education, nurtured an ill-fated love for a woman he couldn’t win, was savaged by critics in his native England, and died unknown to the world at age twenty-five.

But Keats left behind a slim body of poetry that includes some of the most beautiful lyrical works in the English language. His poetic mastery is often cited as being second only to Shakespeare.

Keats’s correspondence is full of riches as well. In May 1819, eighteen months before fatally succumbing to tuberculosis, the twenty-four-year-old poet sent his brother an astonishing letter outlining his philosophy about the human soul. I first read this letter more than a decade ago and have revisited it a few times a year ever since. Keats’s life-affirming perspective always touches me.

The letter seems a natural thing to share on a blog about the soul, for Keats is talking here about the big themes that all of us, by virtue of being alive, must explore: the meaning of life and death; of joy and sorrow; the conflict between fate and freewill; and the nature of identity. In short, he’s talking about the quest of existence itself.

Call the world, if you please, “The Vale of Soul-Making.” Then you find out the use of the world… I say “Soul-Making” — Soul as distinguished from Intelligence. There may be Intelligence, or sparks of the divinity, in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire Identities, till each one is personally itself.

…How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks…to have Identity given to them, so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it is a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion, or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation.

Now Keats takes up a vivid analogy to explore how a unique soul comes to be formed in a world where one is often at the mercy of uncontrollable circumstance.

It’s particularly moving to reflect that the young man writing these words has led a very difficult life, has long been haunted by the conviction that he will die young — and yet, rather than say “no” to life, has opened himself to the troubles and wonders of the heart, and seeks to create art of lasting beauty.

… I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the Horn Book used in that school. [Note: a Horn Book was a child's primer, often covered with a sheet of transparent horn]. And I will call the child able to read the Soul made from that School and its Horn Book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the heart a Horn Book, it is the mind’s Bible, it is the mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its Identity. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls [i.e. each possessing identity] of the sparks of his own essence.

This appears to me a faint sketch of a system which does not affront our reason and humanity. I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labor under would vanish before it.

Keats is saying here what Rilke, another favorite poet of mine, put another way in 1904: “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

And noticing that Keats describes a Soul as Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own, I think of certain inspiring people I’ve been privileged to know in my life — and of inspiring artists whose works never cease to amaze me. These people, and these artists, have a kind of indescribable soulfulness that sets them apart. Unique, wise, humble, and generous, they enrich my life beyond measure. Keats would suggest that these people have such life-enhancing soulfulness to share because they have experienced the world openheartedly.

Now the poet sums up:

Man was formed by circumstances, and what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? And what are touchstones but provings of his heart? And what are provings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? And what is his altered nature but his Soul? And what was his Soul before it came into the world and had these provings and alterations and perfectionings? An Intelligence, without Identity. And how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the heart. And how is the heart to become this medium but in a world of circumstances?

Fate is fickle, life unpredictable, but one is here now, and there’s lots of living to be done.

You might also enjoy:

“The Heroic Journey”

“Time for Everything”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan“

In his essay “What Life Means to Me” (1905), the American novelist Jack London relates the formative experiences of his working life. The essay seems fitting to share following Independence Day, as London is keenly observant regarding the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and social standing—or what Americans have more recently come to call ‘Upward Mobility.’

I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.

Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the only way out was up. … In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery. …

Here London captures a powerfully American theme, one that he will learn (as have most readers) to question. The theme goes like this: With improved social standing comes not only happiness but spiritual enrichment. In other words, increased wealth or stature in turn increases one’s nobleness, graciousness, decency and dignity.

I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money. … I ascertained the current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all this data I concluded that if I began immediately and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in society.

Young London did not wish to spend his prime years in work only to enjoy freedom and ease in a more decrepit season of his life (a model known as the Deferred Life Plan). No, instead he would become his own master. In the celebrated American style, he would mold himself into a wizard of business and create his own fortune. So,

At ten years of age, I became a newsboy on the streets of a city … I had a vision of myself becoming a bald-headed and successful merchant prince. …

For a while it seemed a viable path. By sixteen, London’s zeal had taken him up “the first rung of the business ladder. I was a capitalist. I owned a boat and a complete oyster pirating outfit.” But though he’d improved his financial lot, it turned out that nobleness, graciousness, and decency did not arrive as natural byproducts of success. Instead, London found himself exploiting his boat crew for the sake of profit.

And as it happened, he would climb no further up the business ladder, for he soon found himself reduced by the greed of competing oystermen, who raided his boat and “stole everything, even the anchors.”

So much for London’s business career.

From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists. I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast, a longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories, and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows. And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tyres. I looked at the son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine and good fellowship he enjoyed.

But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a place amongst them and make money out of the muscles of other men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of society.

And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. … I was doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.

London now experienced a bitter irony: the lust for profit that drove industry could destroy an industry’s most precious resource, its best workers’ inborn love of work.

This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp … wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons. …

I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society. … The things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.

London’s avid upward mobility had come to seem more like a steep descent. For now he must not only contend with his natural born poverty, but with the oppressive shame of having failed in his social climb. What to do? London reexamined society, and came to a new conclusion about his options, one that would teach him further difficult lessons.

All things were commodities, all people bought and sold. The one commodity that labour had to sell was muscle.

But … there was no way of replenishing the labourer’s stock of muscle. The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished. …

So there had to be a better way to rise in the world than by using up the unrenewable resource of one’s physical strength. Surely work of the mind, though one might remain poor while doing it, would at least dignify one in the eyes of fellow men.

If I could not live on the parlour floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a vendor of brains.

Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California and opened the books. …

Given his disillusioning experience of the working world, London’s self-education led him to socialist ideas. He soon found himself hanging out with “intellectual revolutionists.”

… I met strong and alert-brained … members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind. …

Here life was clean, noble, and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. …

But London would learn that any hunger for social status and its ostensible dignity, like the desire for enormous wealth, necessitated eating food that made one sick. And a chief dish was hypocrisy.

As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals to me … [but] my disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naïve surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar. …

It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. … [They] prattled … dear little moralities; but … the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. …

The so-called masters of society, the “preachers, politicians, business men, professors, and editors” were equally disappointing to London, who’d hoped “to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive.”

I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. … Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead — clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. …

I talked … with captains of industry, and marveled at how little traveled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

The original goal, for London the boy, had been to attain the American dream of deliverance from poverty through personal initiative and upward mobility—to increase his social standing, find happiness, and gain spiritual enrichment all in one. But now he found himself surrounded by half-men—prosperous and well-respected, perhaps, but spiritually empty.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. … This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. … This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. …

It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime—men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble, but who were not alive. …

Morally and spiritually I was sickened. …

Now, in light of years spent struggling upward through the social strata in search of wealth, respectability, and spiritual fulfillment, London suddenly recognized a more meaningful wealth—and a natural dignity—he’d possessed at the beginning.

I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. …

So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. …

“What Life Means to Me” culminates as a Socialist testimony, but it’s more than manifesto. Beyond its political position, it rings with belief in the human spirit. It affirms the private struggles of individuals passionately pursuing their dreams despite the threats of a lean pocketbook, lifelong obscurity, limitations imposed by class, or the scorn of their contemporaries.

I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, “The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.”

Read “What Life Means to Me” in its entirety here.

You might also enjoy:

“Time for Everything”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance,” first published in 1841, is one of the most inspiring texts I’ve ever encountered. It reads like a gospel for anybody who’s looking to dedicate him or herself to the pursuit of a personally fulfilling life. And because in Emerson’s day such a pursuit often demanded a brave parting of ways with convention, a casting off of societal mores (and still does in our own day, to a lesser degree), “Self Reliance” has a lot to say about courage, inspiration, and the lessons we ought to take from the triumphs and accomplishments of the famous lives that went before us.

I return to “Self Reliance” often, and it never fails to reverberate anew. Here are some of its highlights (and these are highlights only, a mere sampling from the great 30,000 word text).

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. … A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility… Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. …

See another recent Soul Shelter post presenting a similar idea — albeit much less gloriously: the value of keeping a notebook so our “spontaneous impressions” don’t flutter away.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. … A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Here Emerson states the Big Idea of Soul Shelter, which we phrase this way on our “About” page: “All too often a job is just a job, uninspiring or worse. Why is this so? Can things be otherwise? If not, then what changes might we make in order to devote ourselves to work that feels more meaningful?”

What’s Emerson’s solution?

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. … [But] society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. … I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. … What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. … It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. … But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. …

Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. …

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. …

The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. … But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. …

In Emerson’s view, inspiration is active, not passive. The inspired individual, rather than being the lucky recipient of frequent dispatches direct from some angelic muse, is more likely somebody who participates in the power of accomplishments preceding him or her. In other words, the truly inspired person does not wait in a room for an angel to visit, but goes out and collects and samples the fruits of others’ inspiration, closely examining just why this or that inspired work succeeds, and applying the lessons of its success to his or her own talents.

So the self-reliant individual learns to stand before an enduring creation—or ponder the achievements of another—without being cowed or worshipful, and to engage another’s success and synthesize it with his own unique potential.

To be self-reliant in this way, Emerson insists, is to “live in the present … above time,” in a place where ideas of consequence and beauty are abundant, and self-trust is as natural as the existence of a rose.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. …

If we live truly, we shall see truly. … The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. …

I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. … It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. …

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. … We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

The prophetic power of Emerson’s admonishment here always gets me. Who can read such a thing and not feel the irresistible impulse to stand up at last and take arms against his sea of troubles, to set out on the Heroic Journey toward happiness, creative fulfillment, and a balanced and befitting life?

Immediately Emerson goes on to address the problematic American pragmatism that tends to make us timid once an adventuresome undertaking fails to go as we’d hoped. From what I know of American measures of success, these observations hold all too true today.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ’studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. …

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. …

Now, I don’t mean to be too timid and “quote a sage” instead of self-reliantly trusting myself, but that last line is one I ought to plaster to the wall above my desk. Such a simple and powerful truth is too easily forgotten.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. … Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. … Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again. …

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. …

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

So there’s “Self Reliance” in severe abridgement. Find the whole masterful text online, or better yet, buy a volume of Emerson for lifelong reference.

You might also enjoy:

“Time For Everything”

“Simplify, simplify!”

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)“

The British writer Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was a contemporary and acquaintance of the most significant Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. At age 17, Lamb had entered employment in a London office of the East India Company, where he continued to work as a clerk and accountant for 36 years. The “confinement of an office” was Lamb’s livelihood for all but ten years of his adult existence. The avocation of literature, however, always remained his primary passion.

Lamb’s essay “The Superannuated Man” was penned in 1825, immediately following his unexpected retirement from the office. It’s a bittersweet reflection on the pricelessness of personal freedom — and Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of drudgery.

Reading it today, one can’t help but note how little has changed in nearly 200 years. Back then, just as now, being retired was a condition you craved and feared in equal measure. Also, we see that what we call “office life” is nothing new. Lamb speaks of his long-frustrated desire to escape his daily tedium — something many modern readers, caught between earning a living and having a life, can surely relate to. “The Superannuated Man” begins:

If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance…

Lamb had been delivered, at age 50, from his dreary, desk-bound career — and dreary it was indeed, he assures us. Even Sunday, his one day of freedom per week, had tormented him because it always proved so short-lived. Vacations were hard on him for the same reason. He got a week per year. Most Americans today, as we all know too well, are lucky to get two.

…Besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round … was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom…

I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul…

This seemingly endless condition of drudgery had begun to depress Mr. Lamb. One of his colleagues happened to take note of his low spirits. Next thing Lamb knew, he found himself summoned to the boss’s office.

The eldest partner began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time…[he] ended with a proposal, to which his three partners have a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnificent offer!

But once his initial jubilation had passed, the newfound freedom of retirement bewildered Lamb. He hardly knew what to do with himself. Possessing such an overabundance of time, he was also surprised to find himself feeling depressed again:

…For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the Old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty-years’ confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

Suddenly given the opportunity to live however he should choose to, Lamb can’t help brooding upon the subject of how much life he has already resigned to employment in an office.

…I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his…

But he can’t deny, either, that all his time spent in the office was also life, and surely counted for something — maybe even counted for more than he’d thought. After all, he’d had friendships at work, and he’d derived a certain pride and self-worth from doing his job well. In fact, a part of him began to wish he hadn’t retired (had desk-life really been as miserable as he’d sometimes believed?)

…My old desk; the peg where I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. Devil take me if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not– at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for six and thirty years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then after all? or was I a coward simply? Well, it is too late to repent, and I also know that these suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. It shall be some time before I get quite reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies….

I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel…

Here Lamb beautifully observes an ironic truth that many a retiree can understand. Having “grown to his desk,” and having come to loathe his “prison” condition, he nevertheless sees that all passing time is precious. Whenever we cross a threshold and find ourselves forced to recognize an era’s conclusion, we distinctly feel this preciousness of time and wish we’d made more of what we were given (no matter how passionately we’d cursed the daily routines before). Maybe, given more time, we might have found more to appreciate. We might have learned something more about ourselves and our colleagues.

Now, Lamb finds himself adrift in a strange, unburdened existence.

…Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week, or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in it distance from, or propinquity to the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations. The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sat as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations… What is gone of black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a holiday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week day. I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holiday.

In the end, of course, he not only accepts his new condition but learns to cherish it. And his newfound freedom teaches him that slowness, inactivity, and thoughtfulness should not be undervalued.

I have Time for everything…. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him ‘Nothing-To-Do;’ he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those cotton mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down… I am no longer clerk to the firm of _______, etc. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens…

Lamb’s freedom also brings him to reflect that he’d played his part well and offered society his service. Surely there was honor in that. But still, between the lines here, don’t we glimpse a man haunted by regrets? A man, perhaps, who wishes he’d done something different with his life.

…I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked taskwork, and have the rest of the day to myself.

Time is precious indeed, and we do well to spend ours wisely.

(Read “The Superannuated Man” in its entirety here)

You may also enjoy:

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorum”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“