LETTER XXV
COMPENSATORY PLAY
February 1, 1918.
I HAVE looked in on you occasionally during the last few weeks, pleased with your resting for a time.
The ambitious and energetic are prone to underestimate the value of occasional idleness. You cannot run even a machine all the time without oil and rest. Neither can the most vigorous engineer-soul run its brain and body too long without letting them cool. The farmer knows when to let a field lie fallow.
“After the war” it is to be hoped that the soldiers who have worked so long at one labor—that of war—may be given a period of compensatory play, doing nothing, before being replaced in the hive of industry. Let them enjoy the breezes and the perfume of idleness for a little time; the reaction from that rest will send them back into the workshops with renewed desire for activity. If the world has to get along with less for a few weeks, that will not hurt the world.
In the years to come there will be more rest and recreation in America. In Europe there is going to be some degree of fatigue after this war, and America can easily hold her own if she carries a lower steam-pressure.
The idle hours are sometimes as valuable as those that are spent in labor. It is in so-called idle hours that we meditate, get acquainted with ourselves, build air castles, which are working-plans for our edifice of the future. Day dreams are good. I had a day dream during my life, and it was really the working-plan for the future I am building now. I wanted to get back something I had lost, and I have got it back. You wonder what it was? I do not mind telling you. In a former life I went far along the road towards mastership. Then once upon a time I slipped back a long way. My day dream was to recover that lost ground, and I have recovered much of it out here.
If I had not left the world with that day dream vivid in my consciousness, I should not have made the progress and the recovery I have made.
I was talking the other day with an old friend—a very dear old friend—who came out here a year or two ago, and she and I agreed that the day dreams we had dreamed together were among the most valuable products of our recent life.
She is revelling in the recovery of her own lost ground, and she will run me a good race as the years go on. Yes, one can race across recovered ground of adeptship.
My friend said laughingly the other day that she had made more plans since coming out here than she could execute in a long while.
“Take your time,” I advised, “in the execution. You have all eternity.”
She looked at me in the old way I remember so well, and said:
“Time may be made for slaves, but eternity is made for masters.”
She too is glad that she came out. She had done one kind of work long enough, and is now enjoying another.
Is she helping me, you wonder? Well, no, unless you count the pleasure of our renewed association as a help. Why should she help me, or I her? Our work is our own.
You in the world should help each other when you can; but out here we of equal stature help each other by being. That is a good help, though, the being together sometimes.
What a wonderful expression, by the way, “being together”! What poetry! Not working together, nor playing together, but simply being. You must often have felt that joy when with a loved friend. Words are not necessary for that enjoyment. Words often lessen the enjoyment by the very effort of uttering them. Effortless being! Even the birds enjoy it, and the rose could give you valuable secrets of that joy.
In the world I have heard busybodies say of a beautiful woman that she did nothing. What of it? A rose does not run a sewing-machine, or write books.
Joy is coming back to the world. It has been long absent. Being for its own sake has taken on new meanings in the minds of those who are glad to be still alive.
To have passed through all the perils of a long war and still to “be” a living man is something to make the soul wonder.
The men who have fought in this war from the beginning should not be crowded too hard when at last they can stretch their limbs in the hammocks of peace. They have earned the right. As they spin their soldier yarns, gaze at them with respect. They passed through the shadow of death for you. That God has retained them among the active cells of His body is because He has need of them still; but it does not mean that they should go on working for you every minute. Suppose you work for them for a while. When they are rested they will join you in your labor.
Last night I listened to two soldiers talking, and this is what they said to each other:
“What will you do, John, when it’s all over?”
“I’ll lie in the bath tub an hour every morning, in the warm, soft, soapy water; and in the afternoon I’ll call on one dear girl after another, and drink tea, and listen to their talk. And what will you do?”
“Oh, I’ll just look at my wife and hold her hand.”
Idle talk, you think? That depends upon what you mean by idle talk. To me that talk was immensely significant.
Soon after our little skirmish with Spain I remember hearing an active woman say of her husband that he had never been good for anything since he came back from Cuba.
“Well,” I said, “he was good for a lot in Cuba.”
The Spanish-American war! A fly beside an elephant, as compared with this war.
And the German is tired, too. You may not have to overwork yourself to keep up with him after the war.