Randolph Silliman Bourne

“ Let us compel the war to break in on us, if it must, not go hospitably to meet it. Let us force it perceptibly to batter in our spiritual walls. This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the sand, denying realities. When we are broken in on, we can yield to the inexorable. Those who are conscripted will have been broken in on. If they do not want to be martyrs, they will have to be victims. They are entitled to whatever alleviations are possible in an inexorable world. But the others can certainly resist the attitude that blackens the whole conscious sky with war. ”

“ Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. ”

“ Youth finds them the two hardest aspects of life to adjust with the rest of the world in which we live. They are ever-present and pervasive, and yet their manifestations always cause us surprise, and shock us as of something unwonted intruding in our daily affairs. They are the unseen spectres behind life, of which we are always dimly conscious, but which we are always afraid to meet boldly and face to face. We speak of them furtively, or in far-away poetical strains. They are the materials for the tragedies of life, of its pathos and wistfulness, of its splendors and defeats. ”

“ What labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play school, where imagination and interest are awakened. Yet here we find a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more of the old kind of traditional schools! What good will it do to have more school buildings, more teachers, more pay for teachers, even more night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools merely pursue the old limited grind? Labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and vitalized with the modern spirit of “learning by doing,” yet all it can think of to demand is “a seat for every child”! ”

“ On the Government we can put our hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of law-making and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war—or at least, its significant classes—considers that it derives its authority, and its purpose from the idea of the State. ”

“ Those who came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating force. ”

“ If a point of view cannot bear being adopted by another person, if it is not hardy enough to be transplanted, it has little right to exist at all. This world is no hothouse for ideas and attitudes. Too many outworn ideas are skulking in dark retreats, sequestered from the light; every man has great sunless stretches in his soul where base prejudices lurk and flourish. On these the white light of irony is needed to play. And it delights the ironist to watch them shrivel and decay under that light. ”

“ The history of America as a country is quite different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay for all.... ”

“ Only thus shall we conserve the American spirit and saturate the next generation with those qualities which are our strength. Only thus can we take our rightful place among the cultures of the world, to which we are entitled if we would but recognize it. We shall never be able to perpetuate our ideals except in the form of art and literature; the world will never understand our spirit except in terms of art. When shall we learn that “culture,” like the kingdom of heaven, lies within us, in the heart of our national soul, and not in foreign galleries and books? ”

“ For our greatest fears are those of presentiment, and youth is haunted not only by the feeling of past change, but by the presentiment of future change.
Middle age has passed the waters; it has become static and placid. Its wistfulness for youth is unreal, and a forced sentimentality. In the same breath that it cries for its youth it mocks at youth’s preoccupation with the thought of death. The lugubrious harmonies of young poets are a favorite joke. But the feeling of the precariousness of life gives the young man an intimate sense of its preciousness ”

“ He does not pretend to be a “world-patriot,” or a servant of some higher law than his country’s. Nor does he feel blatantly patriotic. With his groping philosophy of life, patriotism has merely died as a concept of significance for him. It is to him merely the emotion that fills the herd when it imagines itself engaged in massed defense or massed attack. Having no such images, he has no feeling of patriotism. He still feels himself inextricably a part of this blundering, wistful, crass civilization we call America. ”

“ EDUCATION AND LIVING
What is the current broadening of the public school—the bringing in of gymnasiums and pools, shops and gardens, dramatics and organized play—but a new effort to realize the school as more a life and less an institution? Are we not getting a little restless over the resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries, reformatories, orphan asylums, rather than to free and joyous communities? A school system whose object was little more than to abolish illiteracy and prepare the more fortunate for college was bound to fall an easy prey to the mechanical organizer. ”

“ The youth sees a pretty face, reads a noble book, hears a stirring appeal for a cause, meets a charming friend, gets fired with the concept of science, or of social progress, becomes attracted to a profession,—the emotion that fixes his enthusiasm and lets out a flood of emotion in that direction, and lifts him into another world, is the same in every case. Youth glories in the sudden servitude, is content to let the new master lead wherever he will; and is as surprised as any one at the momentous and startling results. Youth is vulnerable at every point. ”

“ In Florence I began to understand “futurism,” that crude and glaring artistic expression which arises from the intolerable ennui of the ancient art with which the young Italian is surrounded, the swarms of uncritical foreigners, the dead museums. That Mona Lisa smile of Florence drove me soon to Rome, where I sensed the real Italy, with its industrial and intellectual ferment, its new renaissance of the twentieth century.
Rome is not a city, it is a world. Every century, from the first to the twentieth, has left its traces. ”

“ It is as if the store of life had been accumulating through the slow, placid years of childhood, and suddenly the dam had broken and the waters rushed out, furious and uncontrolled, before settling down into the quieter channels of middle life. The youth is suddenly seized with a poignant consciousness of being alive, which is quite wanting to the naïve unquestioning existence of the child. He finds himself overpoweringly urged toward self-expression. ”

“ Bourne had published that radiant book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the gaya scienza, his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. ”

“ It is this sense of the preciousness of his life, perhaps, that makes a youth so impatient of discipline. Youth can never think of itself as anything but master of things. Its visions are a curious blend of devotion and egotism. Its enthusiasm for a noble cause is apt to be all mixed up with a picture of itself leading the cohorts to victory. The youth never sees himself as a soldier in the ranks, but as the leader, bringing in some long-awaited change by a brilliant coup d’état, or writing and speaking words of fire that win a million hearts at a stroke. ”