Christopher Morley

“ Born out of the same inexplicable soil bred to the same problems of star and wind and sun, what absurdity of civilization is it that has robbed men of this sense of kinship? Why he himself, he feels, could enter a Bedouin tent or an Eskimo snow-hut and find some bond of union with the inmates. The other night, he reflects, he saw moving pictures of some Fiji natives, and could read in their genial grinning faces the same human impulses he knew in himself. What have men done to cheat themselves of the enjoyment of this amazing world? "We've been cheated!" he cries, to the stenographer's horror. ”

“ Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth—they, and excellent Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, who contemplates that rugged and honest beauty as he tills his garden on the land abandoned by squeamish burghers. That is our Aceldama, our Potter's Field, only approached by the athletic, who keep their eyes from Nature's indiscretion by vigorous sets of tennis in the purple shadow of the cliff.
Life is queerly inverted in Marathon. Nature has been so bullied and repressed that she fawns about us timidly. ”

“ And where, among all the Christmas cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing of all our triumphs? Where is the stately apartment house, looming like Gibraltar against a sunset sky? Must we, even at Christmas time, fool ourselves with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is around us?
It is said that man's material achievements have outrun his imagination; that poets and painters are too puny to grapple with the world as it is. ”

“ Slight and debonair as some of his pieces are, there is not one that is not an authentic fiber from life. That is the beauty of this sort of writing—the personal essay—it admits us to the very pulse of the machine. We see this man: selling books at Scribner's, pacing New York streets at night gloating on the yellow windows and the random ring of words, fattening his spirit on hundreds of books, concocting his own theory of the niceties of prose. We see that volatile humor which is native in him flickering like burning brandy round the rich plum pudding of his theme. ”

“ But we will never cease to pray that every honest man should study Boswell. There are many who have topped the rise of human felicity in that book: when reading it they feel the tide of intellect brim the mind with a unique fullness of satisfaction. It is not a mere commentary on life: it is life—it fills and floods every channel of the brain. It is a book that men make a hobby of, as golf or billiards. To know it is a liberal education. I could have understood Germany yearning to invade England in order to annex Boswell's Johnson. ”

“ Every one knows the seizure of anguish that comes just after the closing of a door, when the loved one is still near, within sound of voice, and yet already far away.
The opening and closing of doors is a part of the stern fluency of life. Life will not stay still and let us alone. We are continually opening doors with hope, closing them with despair. Life lasts not much longer than a pipe of tobacco, and destiny knocks us out like the ashes. ”

“ A huge apple, tinted with gold and crimson and pale yellow shading off to pink. The kind of apple whose colors are overlaid with a curious mist until you polish it on your coat, when it gleams like a decanter of claret. An apple so large and weighty that if it had dropped on Sir Isaac Newton it would have fractured his skull. The kind of apple that would have made the garden of Eden safe for democracy, because it is so beautiful no one would have thought of eating it.
That was the kind of apple the Caliph gave us. ”

“ Now these things are merry enough in their way, or they were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach? Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? ”

“ And as I came back across the river, and an airplane hovered over us at a great height, I thought how much we need a Whitman to-day, a poet who can catch the heart and meaning of these grievous bitter years, who can make plain the surging hopes that throb in the breasts of men. The world has not flung itself into agony without some unexpressed vision that lights the sacrifice. ”

“ As soon as I stepped out of doors I caught that faint but unmistakable musk in the air; that dim, warm sweetness. It was the smell of summer, so wholly different from the crisp tang of spring.
It is a drowsy, magical waft of warmth and fragrance. It comes only when the leaves and vegetation have grown to a certain fullness and juice, and when the sun bends in his orbit near enough to draw out all the subtle vapors of field and woodland. It is a smell that rarely if ever can be discerned in the city. It needs the wider air of the unhampered earth for its circulation and play. ”

“ I can imagine the small boys of Boonville fishing for catfish from the piers of the bridge or bathing down by the steamboat dock (if there is one) , and yearning for the day when they, too, will be grown up and old enough to smoke corncobs.
What is the subtle magic of a corncob pipe? It is never as sweet or as mellow as a well-seasoned briar, and yet it has a fascination all its own. It is equally dear to those who work hard and those who loaf with intensity. When you put your nose to the blackened mouth of the hot cob its odor is quite different from that fragrance of the crusted wooden bowl. ”

“ Love, or kindness, is fundamental energy enough to satisfy any brooder. And Christmas Day means the birth of a child; that is to say, the triumph of life and hope over suffering.
Just for a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the stupid, harsh mechanism of the world runs down and we permit ourselves to live according to untrammeled common sense, the unconquerable efficiency of good will. We grant ourselves the complete and selfish pleasure of loving others better than ourselves. ”

“ Having just been photographed, he was in high good humor.
"What a pity," he said, "that you in America have no literature that reflects the amazing energy, the humor, the raciness of your life! I woke up last night at the hotel and heard a motor fire engine thunder by. There's a symbol of the extraordinary vitality of America! My, if I could only live over here a couple of years, how I'd like to try my hand at it. It's a pity that no one over here is putting down the humor of your life." ”

“ The landscape round Marathon is lovely, but it has itself well in hand. The hills all pretend to be gentle declivities. There is a beautiful little sheet of water, reflecting the trailery of willows, a green salute to the eye. In a robuster community it would be a swimming hole—but with us, an ornamental lake. Only in one spot has Nature forgotten herself and been so brusque and rough as to jut up a very sizable cliff. This is the loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown stone. ”

“ Many must have felt this same uneasiness in trying to find Christmas cards that would really say something of what is in their hearts. The sentiment behind the card is as lovely and as true as ever, but the cards themselves are outmoded bottles for the new wine. It seems a cruel thing to say, but we are impatient with the mottoes and pictures we see in the shops because they are a conventional echo of a beauty that is past. ”

“ And it is as grandmothers that our mothers come into the fullness of their grace. When a man's mother holds his child in her gladdened arms he is aware (with some instinctive sense of propriety) of the roundness of life's cycle; of the mystic harmony of life's ways. There speaks humanity in its chord of three notes: its little capture of completeness and joy, sounding for a moment against the silent flux of time. ”

“ It is a symbol of human life.
The opening of doors is a mystic act: it has in it some flavor of the unknown, some sense of moving into a new moment, a new pattern of the human rigmarole. It includes the highest glimpses of mortal gladness: reunions, reconciliations, the bliss of lovers long parted. Even in sadness, the opening of a door may bring relief: it changes and redistributes human forces. But the closing of doors is far more terrible. It is a confession of finality. Every door closed brings something to an end. And there are degrees of sadness in the closing of doors. ”

“ And therefore it seemed to the Urchin's curators sound and advisable to take him out to the Zoo one Sunday afternoon just to suggest to his delightful mind that nothing is impossible in this curious world.
Of course, the amusing feature of such expeditions is that it is always the adult who is astounded, while the child takes things blandly for granted. You or I can watch a tiger for hours and not make head or tail of it—in a spiritual sense, that is—whereas an urchin simply smiles with rapture, isn't the least amazed, and wants to stroke the "nice pussy." ”

“ They know that life is built at too dear a price to be so lathered in corruption and woe. Those who create life, who know its humility, its tender fabric and its infinite price, who have cherished and warmed and fed it, do not lightly cast it into the pit.
Mothers are great in the eyes of their sons because they are knit in our minds with all the littlenesses of life, the unspeakably dear trifles and odds of existence. The other day I found in my desk a little strip of tape on which my name was marked a dozen times in drawing ink, in my mother's familiar script. ”

“ And it is in the grasp of the relentless sun that growing things yield up their innermost vitality and emanate their fragrant essence. I have seen fields of tobacco under a hot sun that smelt as blithe as a room thick with blue Havana smoke. I remember a pile of birch logs, heaped up behind a barn in Pike County, where that mellow richness of summer flowed and quivered like a visible exhalation in the air. It is the goodly soul of earth, rendering her health and sweetness to her master, the sun. ”

“ It is as complicated as the calculation by which a woman tells time by her watch which she knows to be wrong—she adds seventeen minutes, subtracts three, divides by two and then looks at the church steeple. It is as exhilarating as trying to deduce what there is going to be for supper by the pervasive fragrance of onions in the front hall. And sometimes a very small event, like a very small onion, can cast its rumors a long way. Destiny is unlike the hen in that she cackles before she lays the egg. ”

“ Some man may have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we looked so intolerably smug in Philadelphia!
So at Christmas we tap that vast reservoir of wisdom and strength—call it efficiency or the fundamental energy if you will—Kindness. And our kindness, thank heaven, is not the placid kindness of angels; it is veined with human blood; it is full of absurdities, irritations, frustrations. A man 100 per cent. kind would be intolerable. As a wise teacher said, the milk of human kindness easily curdles into cheese. ”

“ If Marathon prefers not to call a flivver a flivver, I shall not expostulate. And yet this quaint subterfuge should not be carried quite so far. Stone walls are made for sunny lounging; yet stone walls in Marathon are built with uneven vertical projections to discourage the sedentary. Nothing is more delightful than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead. Bless me, Nature herself has taken to the same insincerity. ”

“ Standing by the crib of one's own baby, with that world-old pang of compassion and protectiveness toward this so little creature that has all its course to run, the heart flies back in yearning and gratitude to those who felt just so toward one's self. Then for the first time one understands the homely succession of sacrifices and pains by which life is transmitted and fostered down the stumbling generations of men. ”

“ Yet the extraordinary scenario in which Boswell filmed him for us has attained that curious estate of great literature the characteristic of which is that every man imagines he has read it, though he may never have opened its pages. It is like the historic landmark of one's home town, which foreigners from overseas come to study, but which the denizen has hardly entered. It is like Niagara Falls: we have a very fair mental picture of the spectacle and little zeal to visit the uproar itself. ”

“ All through November and December we watch it drawing nearer; we see the shop windows begin to glow with red and green and lively colors; we note the altered demeanor of bellboys and janitors as the Date flows quietly toward us; we pass through the haggard perplexity of "Only Four Days More" when we suddenly realize it is too late to make our shopping the display of lucid affectionate reasoning we had contemplated, and clutch wildly at grotesque tokens—and then (sweetest of all) comes the quiet calmness of Christmas Eve. ”

“ Day after day slips or jolts past, joins the Great Majority; suddenly we wake with a start to find that the best of it is gone by. Surely it seems but a day ago that Stevenson set out to write a little book that was to be called "Life at Twenty-five"—before he got it written he was long past the delectable age—and now we rub our eyes and see he has been dead longer than the span of life he then so delightfully contemplated. If there is one meditation common to every adult on this globe it is this, so variously phrased, "Well, bo, Time sure does hustle." ”