Front Matter · As a woman thinks

AS A WOMAN THINKS

HEROISM IN NATURE THAT WE DO NOT COMPREHEND]

AS A WOMAN THINKS

BY CORRA HARRIS _Author of “My Book and Heart”_

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1925

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

INTRODUCTORY

This is not a mystical tale, nor a literary interpretation of addled-egg metaphysics. The mind I have has always been laid off sensibly according to the latitudes and longitudes of actual experiences in this present world. I never had an aura, nor the least confidence in the existence of an oversoul. This phrase is the name of a subliminal hysteria, pardonable in poets, but not in prose people with ordinary midget souls. The one I have is no part of the common spiritual vestment. On the contrary, it is an astounding fact too intimately connected with my private consciousness to be exploited in a book, or a street car, or any other public conveyance. I may draw rings around it at a respectful distance before this record ends; I may speculate prudently on souls in general, as one does in futures sometimes; but I shall not risk the presumption of phonographing our immortal part. It is offensive.

The mind is different. This is something no man will deny having, although he may deny his soul. Even if he is pathetically limited mentally, he is the enthusiastic autobiographer of what he thinks. If he has no character, and no energy to achieve, he is the more likely to be the historian, the dramatist, poet and prophet of his mind. He cannot retain it. I have sometimes thought this explains how we came by that safety valve called language. If we should suffer a total aphasia of words, I suppose the human species would explode. The mind develops so much more power in thinking than we can possibly achieve in action.

And to the last, the minds of other men, their secret thoughts, the motives from which their actions spring remain the most interesting things we can find out.

What follows is such a biography; not an analysis, nor a confession, but the drama I have lived in thinking and believing; how the mind I have, determined my conduct, courage, cowardice, and literally created the life I have lived in spite of everything.

This is no vast undertaking like following the trail of a great intellect. I am incapable of measuring the convolutions of such a brain, say, as Herbert Spencer’s. In any case the record would be scientific, not interesting. These people are born bright, but drab, humanly speaking. I am not opposed to them, you understand; they have their place somewhere over our heads, but not in the common life we lead. My justification in choosing a simpler mind to exploit is that most of us have this kind. We have actual experience in living our thoughts; and the way we do it tears mere philosophy to shreds, no matter how well and logically it has been thought out.

If you are writing the life of a prime minister, you begin by laying the scenes in the times in which he lived. You must set down the kind of king he served, discuss the people and problems that engaged his attention and made him a great man. I am recording the history of a mind as far removed as possible from the grandeur of kings and the policies of prime ministers. But like these more pretentious biographers, I am drawing my scenes in the right place, giving you a glimpse of the summer-minded, slipshod gentlemen who traveled this road, mismanaged their bankrupt fortunes with such humor and courage, because these are my people. There is a fine rich pigment in the quality of these people which imparts that first clear color to the mind, and may account for the bright loom of thought upon which I spun the days of my life with some wit, a certain dexterous sweetness and an awful strength of hope never justified by the facts.

I do not know how it may be with others who have outgrown themselves and become merely the residents of culture and learning, but I experience a sensation of uneasiness when conversing with a man who evades his own personal pronoun. I always change my seat as soon as possible, because he is concealing some one who should be present and apparent if he is talking.

He will never say ‘I think,’ ‘I believe,’ or ‘I know,’ but he will begin with ‘It is said.’ This may be a scholarly affectation of self-effacement, for all I know, but it is neither natural nor sincere.

We are every one born in the first person singular. We live and die feeling that way. Therefore the pronoun ‘I’ is the most honest and revealing word in the English language. It is our obligatory oral signature. It is not an egotistical part of speech, unless you are an egotist, but the born-and-bred name by which every man calls himself. Without this provision, you may say, of nature in him, we should never be able to identify him or know whether he is talking his own truth or his own lies or quoting them from some one else.

This is the reason why certain of my books are written in the first person. They must be. It is my way of writing as other people feel, interpretative. I am being confidential, not boastful, except possibly where we may boast together. I am telling experience common to us as human beings and giving the reader the advantage of keeping his own silence.

The method works. It encourages many to give tongue to their lives and feelings, which is a relief if they have held them in for a long time and never expected to see them said anywhere. Just write the truth of your own heart and you will find out how many men and women have lived that same truth more valiantly than you have without emitting it into copy! I have had to make that humbling revision of my attributes since the publication of ‘My Book and Heart.’ These silent ones who write letters not for publication have found in this volume the witness of their own hearts, a record more intimate and personal to them than if it had been written in the third person, or of one already dead and subject in the very nature of the case to biographical speculations.

The record I am now writing will have no such effect, though it may be equally veracious, because we are further apart in our thoughts than we ever are in our feelings. We may talk much or little, but most of our thinking is done and kept in silence. The human mind is a queer thing. It has more ways of the wild creatures than we have. It never ceases to circle either upon the wing or to prowl in that secret darkness which conceals every man’s mind. It goes off and comes back laden with strange thoughts while you sit gazing with candid eyes into the candid eyes of your companion, whose mind has also been out scouting around and has returned without ever meeting your mind on the way.

I suppose many a man, seated in the possessive case beside some woman, who has a Spencerian countenance and speaks to him in pale blue language of sweetness, would leap for his life if he could see so much as the flash of the thought she is whetting in her neat little head against his peace and happiness. And sometimes if a woman had a look into the mind of her hero she might become an idol breaker in the twinkling of an eye.

But we are not to be judged by what goes on in our minds. One never gets cut in a word or a deed. If all the tools of vengeance forged there were used, this world would be a terrible place. If all the dark thoughts we have were spoken, no man or woman would trust us. But these are the mental vaporings of our lower and meaner natures, conquered in most of us by the moral sense we have acquired which has established better standards.

A wise man can record all he knows of life in one book; but the scriptures of the common man require two books, and maybe a few gospels, as a sort of quotient in the long division of living. For us there would be the book of the heart, where we keep memories, the hopes that failed, our loves and hates, and whatever Beatitude we needed to comfort or praise us, whether it is a friend, a woman, or a bit of the Word. Your wise man takes no account of this copy. In his analysis of the phenomenon of man, the heart is a figure of speech which refers to the reflex action of the emotions. Then there is for us the other record of the mind, quite distinct. It is the place where we keep the law, or break it; the motives which stimulate and control us, and determine our relations to other men--and to God, who we think made us.

This last notion, in my opinion, is a gross exaggeration of the functions of the Almighty. He made what we call mind and we use it to create ourselves. It works one way in this generation and another way in the next generation. Sometimes it is war; then it is religion, art, one kind of science or another; or it may be a magnificent covetousness, practiced under such terms as industrialism, commercialism, or even the League of Nations--always filled with eleemosynary impulses, for conscience’ sake, according to that very shrewd mind he is developing. It is really the sand-pile where the ostrich of him hides its head. It is at last that thing in us which is as easily degraded by a false belief as by the meanest vice. It can exalt a heathen and trap a Christian saint. It is the way of life we choose, right or wrong.

If some one laid his mind on the table, so to speak, not as a confession, nor even as a defense, but as a certified human document, it might cast a flicker of light upon dark corners to be turned in the lives of other people. So if I show what a dim thing it was in the beginning, how a child divines peace and happiness without thinking, what a terror thinking became afterwards, how bravely and adventurously my mind guided me, how cunningly it misguided me, what burdensome rewards it earned for me, and what dividends in peace I have lost by following the best Scriptures according to my mind--some of you who read this record may get a hint to watch the thing and control it more wisely than I have controlled mine.

What I shall write will be sown with errors from the point of view of a psychologist, which will be proof to you that it is a veracious record. There may be laws governing mind; but if so, they are like so many other laws we cannot keep and survive. A logical sentence in thinking according to the exigencies of living is bound to be a very short sentence. The longer ones that last through the days of our years contradict much wisdom and a good many Scriptures. But we do get through, and looking back we do see the Word still standing, not changed.