Randolph Silliman Bourne

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The scientific philosophy is as much a matter of metaphysics, of theoretical conjecture, as the worst fanaticisms of religion. We have a right to shoot our guesses into the unknown. Life is no adventure if we let our knowledge, still so feeble and flickering, smother us. In this scientific age there is a call for youth to soar and paint a new spiritual sky to arch over our heads. If the old poetry is dead, youth must feel and write the new poetry. It has a challenge both to transcend the physical evil that taints the earth and the materialistic poison that numbs our spirits. ”

“ Therefore, it is perhaps unfair to say that the older generation rules the world. Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young. It is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle in the person of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more. And the tragedy of life is that the world is run by these damaged ideals. That is why our ideas are always a generation behind our actual social conditions. ”

“ We can connect this conscious life with no other aspect of the world nor can we explain it by any of the principles which we apply to physical things. It is the divine gift that reveals this world; why may it not reveal sometime a far wider universe?
It is this incalculability of our conscious life that makes its seeming end so great an adventure. This Time which rushes past us, blotting out everything it creates, leaving us ever suspended on a Present, which, as we turn to look at it, has melted away,—how are we to comprehend it? ”

“ 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 ”

“ For a truly sincere life one talent is needed,—the ability to steer clear of the forces that would warp and conventionalize and harden the personality and its own free choices and bents. All the kingdoms of this world lie waiting to claim the allegiance of the youth who enters on the career of life, and sentinels and guards stand ready to fetter and enslave him the moment he steps unwarily over the wall out of the free open road of his own individuality. ”

“ Irony keeps the waters in motion, so that the ice never has a chance to form. The cut-and-dried life is easy to form because it has no sense of contrast; everything comes to one on its own terms, vouching for itself, and is accepted or rejected on its own good looks, and not for its fitness and place in the scheme of things.
This is the courage and this the sympathy of irony. Have they not a beauty of their own comparable in excellence with the paler glow of religious virtue? And the understanding of the ironist although aggressive and challenging has its justification, too. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We should not be playing our right place in society if we enjoyed such a prostitution of energies. One of the most insidious of the economic pressures is this awaking the interest of youth in useless and wasteful work, work that takes away energy from production to dissipate in barter and speculation and all the thousand ways that men have discovered of causing money to flow from one pocket to another without the transference of any fair equivalent of real wealth. We can dodge these pressures not by immolating ourselves, but by letting the routine work lie very lightly on our soul. ”

“ Infinitely finer, it seems to youth, is it to soar freely in the air, than to run on a track along the ground! And perhaps youth is right. In his intellectual life, the young man’s scorn for the pedantic and conventional amounts almost to an obsession. It is only the men of imagination and inspiration that he will follow at all. But most of these professors, these lawyers, these preachers,—what has been their training and education, he says, but a gradual losing of the grip of life, a slow withdrawing into an ideal world of phrases and concepts and artificial attitudes? ”

“ If they treated their business interests as they do the interests of their personality, they would be bankrupt within a week. Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation, of their own experience. Few know how to weave a philosophy of life out of it, that most precious of all possessions. And few know how to hoard their memory. For no matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how imperfect and jagged—in some places perhaps irreparably—our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. ”

“ To those without the spark, the new life will come stained by prejudice. Their reactions will be dulled; they will not see clearly; and will either stagger at the shock, or go stupidly ahead oblivious of the spiritual wonders on every side. Only those who have been allowed to grow freely like young plants, with the sun and air above their heads, will get the full beauty and benefit of youth. Only those whose eyes have been kept wide open ceaselessly learning the facts of the material and practical world will truly appreciate the values of the moral world, and be able to acquire virtue. ”

“ 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 wonder of it is exhaustless,—the beneficence over whose workings there yet breathes an inexorable sternness, the mystery of time and death, the joy of beauty and creative art and sex, and sheer consciousness.
Against this scenic background, along this deep undercurrent of feeling, our outward, cheerful, settled, and orderly life plays its part. That life is no less essential; we must be willing to see life in two aspects, the world as deathless yet ever-creative, evolution yet timeless eternity. ”

“ A man by becoming your friend has not committed himself to all the demands which you may be pleased to make upon him. Foolish people like to test the bonds of their friendships, pulling upon them to see how much strain they will stand. When they snap, it is as if friendship itself had been proved unworthy. But the truth is that good friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious things. For friendship is an adventure and a romance, and in adventures it is the unexpected that happens. ”

“ It is here that youth’s quarrel with the elder generation comes in. There is no scorn so fierce as that of youth for the inertia of older men. The lack of adjustment to the ideas of youth’s elders and betters, one of the permanent tragedies of life, is certainly the most sensational aspect of youth. That the inertia of the older people is wisdom, and not impotence, is a theory that you will never induce youth to believe for an instant. The stupidity and cruelties of their management of the world fill youth with an intolerant rage. ”