Christopher Morley

“ Well, there are instants of preposterous happiness, clear insight, that are just like that—little packages of reality, tied up in the twine of our time sense, that come to us direct, intact, from the eternity and infinity we call God. It matters little how [60] you explain that great word to yourself. Perhaps you mean by it the sum total of all human awarenesses of beauty. In that sense of prevailing loveliness we are all obscurely united. In those moments, moments of heavenly farce and unredeemable tragedy, we can forgive ourselves for being only human. ”

“ One dreams of uttering only some small granule of broken truth, something more than the jocund trickery of the press.
Every philosopher is a humorist who has been squeezed. And the newspaper man, odd as this may sound, is not the least appropriate student to pursue the wingy mysteries in divinity. For he is kinspirit of the parson in this, that church and press are perhaps the two professions that have most frankly regarded themselves as separate estates, above and apart from the common man. The priest esteems himself the vicar of God. ”

“ By religion we mean, I suppose, our ligatures with an unseen world—a world not realized, as Wordsworth says in those “Intimations” that are a whole prayer-book in themselves. There are “high instincts,” he tells us, before which we tremble “like a guilty thing surprised.” Our guilt, surely, is that we know ourselves to have been so wearily and perversely disloyal to that unseen world of beauty and ecstasy; and our surprise, that when we escape into the honest solitudes of the mind we find it waiting for us. ”

“ How idle to ask whether newspapers tell the truth! With truth they have little concern. Their trade is in facts; like all prosperous tradesmen they are reasonably conscientious. To belittle newspapers for not telling the truth is as silly as to regard them as training-ground for literature. Literature and journalism rarely overlap.
For the newspaper world, that vast, brightly coloured, contentious, and phantasmagoric picture of life that it evolves for its readers, is mostly a spurious world [12] evolved for hurried and ignorant people. ”

“ So every human being stands at the centre of a little eddy or whirl of testimony. If one could make a map or editor’s projection of him considered as a news item—it would be as complicated as an ocean chart with festoons of barographs and isotherms, curves and twists and arrows indicating set of currents, prevailing winds, soundings. ”

“ Gossips are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest possible; namely, God. There is truly some strange analogy between church and press. Whether it is the successful newspaper’s taste for making itself clerical in architecture, or the successful church’s appetite for front-page controversy; whether it is that they both make the cruellest and deadliest of enemies if annoyed; whether it is that the newspaper carries on the medieval church’s lust of persecution ”

“ And the newspaper man himself, who both loves and hates his queer trade, would be the first to remember that one always is severest with what one adores. Every movement is set in [59] some strange turning of wonder. As a man will suddenly discover in himself some miserable petty trick of behaviour which, he painfully realizes, is a true microcosm and characteristic of his life as a whole, so now and then with the world at large. We are aware of lights and shadows and moments of millennium that seem a part of some vast consistency. ”

“ The only possible suggestion that one might humbly venture to offer to the authoritative officers of Holy Church is that they are too sane and too businesslike. They ask us to believe not things that are too hard, but too easy. They are too eager to lock the stable door after the Messiah has been [58] stolen. They have learned the tricks of our world of flesh so glibly that they seem sometimes to forget the manners of that world of spirit they are commissioned to represent.
For the world is fascinating and painful beyond human power of testimony. The best of every life is unprintable. ”

“ Robinson Crusoe’s religion was merely a calculus of personal benefit. When he found that the seeds he threw away had sprouted and come up, he suddenly remembered the goodness of God. But gradually men tend to rise sufficiently above their own pangs and pleasures to relish the conception of a vaster God—a God who does not even know that we exist. There are still, astounding as it seems, actual and living parsons who tell us that the Museum of Natural History is an affront to the Deity. ”

“ So we are hunting, hunting endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or we are surf-bathers in an ocean where one step carries us beyond our depth. Accept any figure of speech that appeals to you. No work of art or literature yet, so far as I know, has given an adequate presentment of the glory and agony and mirth and excitement of being alive. ”

“ In an ocean so various we should find our victim leading a thousand different phantom lives in the opinion of others. If you begin to think about this sort of thing, the asylum waits; for truly, confronted by the alternating delights and possibilities of life, the mind is not unlike that chameleon that went mad when tethered on a Paisley shawl. ”

“ A leading editorial, tearing passions to tatters, could arise by spontaneous combustion, exhaling itself somehow from the general uproar and joy. Virgin birth would be no miracle in a newspaper office: I have seen, and myself committed, editorial matter whose parent had never been approached by any siring intelligence.
Or, in the case of the reporter, painfully trained in a generous human skepticism, enforced student of the way people behave [44] and the way things happen, alert to discern the overtones of irony and pathos in the event, you might expect him to be the least credulous of beings. ”

“ And with all their agile and cautious skill at hiding what they really think, men wildly crave those liberating sorceries (liquor and love and laughter, perhaps even literature, too) that roll away the stone from the door of the heart.
Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks about religion except for the pleasure of [19] the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse. For the less we talk about religion, probably, the nearer we come to the heart of it. ”

“ This humorous ancient was not unlike the modern newspaper man. The hideous noise of the press, its conscience-annulling haste, its sense of power and almost uncontradictable certainty, [A] are [43] what he employs to warn his soul, his reason, not to look over his shoulder while he is at work. The fact is that the whole ingenious mechanism of a newspaper is so automatically conjointed and revolves so rapidly that by sheer fury and speed of movement it takes on a kind of synthetic life of its own. ”

“ Body and soul, tied together back to back, see different realms of sky. And the innermost capsule of mind, that very I of very I, though wretchedly at the mercy of pains and lusts, is yet also oddly detached. ”

“ Yet, if I understand correctly, gold is the only genuine money there is; all the other stuff is merely money by convention. And how beautifully valid in regard to truth as well. Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than the golden mintage they rarely encounter! ”

“ I was greatly struck, approaching Pittsburgh on the train, passing through a black, cindered region where life must lack many of its most harmless pleasures, to notice the astounding number of churches. These, surely, are not there without some sound social reason. There are three prime consolations known to man in the difficulty of his life, God, love, and money. ”

“ Man’s sovereign faculty of pretense works upon them. He persuades himself that these little rites and short-cuts are not really made by himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s capacity for pretense, I dare say, has been the only thing that has kept him going in a rough, bruising world. ”

“ The world of newspapers and the life of newspaper men are for the most part vulgar, and therefore delightful. I mean vulgar in its exact sense: it is a word neither of praise nor blame, both of which are foreign to philosophy. ”

“ And truly I don’t think that any man who has worked in downtown New York can be much of an atheist. In that great jungle of violent life, under the glittering spires of such steep cathedrals, he must inevitably be a trifle mad. Even Manhattan, supposed to be most material of cities, is best known for the fantastic figure she cuts against the sky. ”

“ In his tight place, beset by doubts just as acute as those of the young theologian, our newspaper man ratiocinates upon the [49] quaint processes of mind. He broods on the haphazard, interest-tainted, and fallible nature of most mortal opinion. He studies the relativity of truth and the proliferation of rumour. He notes how every event is like a stone cast into a pond; it ejaculates concentric vibrations, widening loops of hearsay. Varying layers or rings of truth are available for different classes of bystanders, or bythinkers. ”

“ One does not argue with moonlight. Men talk of “finding God,” but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest of hiding-places, your own heart. You yourself are a part of Him. The chief danger is to be too prosaic. Any one who has ever done proof-reading knows the delicious fidelity and strict zeal and maddening literalness with which the professional corrector marks a galley-proof. ”

“ Human meeting introduces awkwardly human difficulties and embarrassments. It introduces, for instance, vanity and humility, both awkward encumbrances to truth. Is there a man who does not know, sorrowfully, that he is much “better company” when he is alone? ”

“ First of all, man is orderly. Finding himself in a grotesquely complicated universe, he hastily tries to reduce what he sees to some general principles. He concocts helpful formulæ, rules of thumb, mnemonic rhymes, all sorts of proverbs, to simplify matters. There has been a rather absurd eagerness on the part of the newspapers to reproach the church for its adherence to formalism. But man is a formula-bearing animal. And I doubt if the most rigid bishop who ever lived was more at the mercy of ritual and formulated ways of expression than the average city editor. ”

“ We who have lived, as best we could, for the decency of letters; who have vigiled with Chaucer and taken wine with Descartes and changed opinion with Doctor Johnson, are we to be hired to and fro by the genial hucksters who know the art of print chiefly as a rapid factory for gaily tinted palaver? ”

“ Journalism, like every skilled métier, tends to become a sort of priesthood. All such professional groups admit with cynical or humorous readiness, inside the circle, truths that it is unmannerly to gossip abroad. But now and then some happy member feels he has absorbed enough hokum to last him for a reasonable lifetime. He has enjoyed, perhaps even profited by, the sharp childishness of that way of life. ”

“ The ambassador knows, better than any other, that truth is condiment, not diet. It is rough manners to shove truth at people when they are not expecting it. There is always charming significance in popular phrases. “The dreadful truth” is such a one. Truth is always dreaded, not so much because [37] it is gruesome or tragic, but because it is so often absurd.
The church, then, comes before us as envoy from the world of spirit to the world of flesh ”

“ College students and wild hockey berserks and miscellaneous small fry scuttled and careered about; now and then a rubber puck would skim across the ice, and like a pack of hounds the barbarian rout would sweep upon that tranquil shore of the pond. For a moment the pensive skaters would be blotted out by swirling movement—clattering sticks, ringing skates, noisy shouts. ”

“ Nor, on consideration, do we find the masculine pronoun a symbol of such benevolent majesty that it need much longer be retained as spokesman for Deity. It is necessary for man to know, as astronomers do, the inconceivable minuteness of himself and his affairs.
Yet, knowing his unimportance, it is equally urgent for man to act as though his business were momentous. For the [24] whole intellectual life is based upon paradox and dainty artifice. And here we encounter some fundamental characteristics of human behaviour which are highly interesting. ”

“ The newspaper man prefers to take his stand with Tolstoy, who said, in that thrilling book “A Confession”: “I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as necessarily inexplicable.” He prefers that [53] when there is an available and mortally recognizable way of understanding things, they should so be understood. Take, for example, the story of the miracle at Cana. To a man trained to observe the delightful ways in which testimony arises and is transmitted, how does that story explain itself? ”

“ Of all mistresses, the fairest and the farthest away is Truth. God is known, if at all, in solitude.
§3
The theological bickerings of our time and their “tincture of choler,” as Hobbes would say, are due perhaps to the uneven progress of a great shift in the human [21] notion of God. The primitive imagination of Deity is often of a gigantic omnipotent and omnipresent personality. Then, later, men come to think of God as a kind of force or law, or a harmony among infinite laws and forces. ”

“ I have often noticed, in burning a pile of dead leaves, that the mass that seems burned through will, if turned over with the rake, burst into fresh flame. Down under the mound, smothered by weight and closeness, were many fragments that needed only air and freedom to burst into golden blaze. ”