YOU MAKE YOURSELF

The forces that create us pass away, whether they are parents, teachers, or books, and we are left at last to re-create ourselves in the image of our own minds. This was what happened to me after the death of my husband. The woman I was and the mind I had then faded into a sort of peaceful silence. I was not for a long time. I remember feeling strangely like a ghost, surrounded by the same friends, in the midst of familiar scenes, but not of them, removed by death as far, maybe, as he was from the mind and life I had with him. He had been my altar and my church, I discovered.

From that day forth I escaped from the meekness of being merely a Methodist. I was Hagar going off into the wilderness with my own Bible, leaving behind me forever the Abraham and Rebecca brethren and sisters of the established order. I was in danger of raising up the very Ishmael of a mind against them. But this passed. By nature I am short on vindictiveness. I am not even respectable at this point. I have known myself to relax and forgive people whom I doubt if the Lord will ever forgive. They seem to pass out of my thoughts like shadows that obscure the light.

This happened later. Directly after Lundy’s death I was a very dangerous person, quite mad with the pain and horror of what had happened to him.

I have a vivid picture of myself at this time one day in my darkened house. I am sitting outrageously straight, pale and wan in my black dress, but not bowed down or weeping as a widow should be. And I am being visited by a great preacher in our church who has come to pray with me, to the end that I shall find the grace to forgive certain brethren who used my husband despitefully in his last days. But I refuse to kneel or to pray or forgive these men. Let God do it, I told him, since the Lord only knows how and when to pardon us. I left them terribly in His hands and sat with mine neatly folded, while this prince of the Church parted his coat tails and fairly shook the shadows of that sad place with his petition in my behalf. Then he arose, faced about, and stared at me.

‘Their sins be upon their own heads,’ I retorted, feeling very pale and weak, but tearless and determined.

I may have referred to this incident in another place, but I am copying it here to indicate that as soon as that I was stripping my mind of religious sentimentality and assuming a sensible relation to the Lord, who believes profoundly in punishing wickedness even if a good man commits it.

Shortly after this I had an assignment from the editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ to go abroad and write a series of articles about the women of the Old World.

I was seriously ill at the time, depleted in mind and body; but I accepted the commission, as a gambler takes a bet, without giving the editor the least intimation about my physical condition. You cannot be overscrupulous in dealing with editors without queering your own game. Very few of them will arrange with a sick man to do a long piece of work. My idea is to keep my word with them if I die for it, and to leave them to take all the other risks. Even at that I have been obliged to deny myself the vanity of making many contracts with them on account of knowing that I can write just so many words a day, and that there are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Which is as much as I am capable of morally in my relations with them.

On my way home, after making this arrangement, it occurred to me that I would stop over at Dr. Howard Kelly’s hospital in Baltimore and find out exactly how ill I was; not that this would make any difference in my plans to go abroad, but I wanted to get some idea of the odds in my own body against this achievement.

Doctor Kelly was positive that I was in no condition to go. I was a very sick person. If I persisted in this undertaking, he predicted that I would be brought home feet foremost, which in my opinion is a very dull way to arrive.

I sailed two weeks later, stirred around for six months among the women in the various countries of Europe and wrote my impressions of them. Those articles would read now as old daguerreotypes look of a far former generation. Some of the great ones whom I met then are dead, like Frau Cower of Berlin. I doubt if she would be great now if she were living. Women have changed the definition of their greatness since then. She was a neat, dim little old woman with a piece of lace pinned like a rosette on top of her gray hair. She had a patient, enlightened, philosophical mind about the future of her country women. The emperor reviewed his troops that very day in September of 1911, but I do not suppose Frau Cower had the least inkling of the terrible future already dawning for German women. My idea of her is that if she had known she would have skipped the Great War by the length of a century and gone on with her calculations as if that had been an interruption in destiny. She had a long-distance mind.

Rosa Goldberg was the most notorious woman in Germany then, but not the most influential. If there was one with actual influence there at that time, it was Alice Soloman. I have often wondered what became of her. She had power and charm, a certain beautiful enthusiasm that made her effective with men. But Rosa was murdered. This was before the time when it was conceivable to deal so with even the worst of women in public life.

Emma Goldman, a far worse woman, was quite the fashion in this country then. She had her disciples among a certain class of our decadent intellectuals, to say nothing of the great following in her own class. I remember her well, slouchily dressed, with a scrubwoman’s figure, black hair, straight and parted in the middle, black eyes, large and strong, that missed focusing on other women’s faces. Olive skin, flushed, thick, red lips, the lower one loose. She taught dishonor and deserved death, but worked like an evil worm at the foundation of our social order for twenty years before she was even banished. Which always seemed to me a futile sort of gesture, in view of the fact that immigrants are examined at Ellis Island for physical disorders and are rejected on account of having a pimple, but are permitted to enter with the most frightful diseases of the mind.

The point about this first adventure I made abroad is that I survived it and came home head foremost in the business of living as usual.

I have survived a number of physicians who predicted my death. It is not so difficult. You simply make up your mind not to die of your complaint, however fatal it sounds in the diagnosis, but to live according to your spirit as much as possible. I am not expecting to keep up the struggle indefinitely. This body is not so substantial as it used to be. The dear thing will drop off me some day like a worn-out garment. But I shall have got the last shred of wear and tear out of it. And I shall always remember in paradise what a brave chance I had in it to do and think and go about on my two feet, which in my present mortal state still seems a safer way of traveling than by wing.

I do not pretend to be a grasping, discriminating student of the Bible. I have chosen from it what I need, but I cannot even claim to have read it through consecutively. Many enlightening passages may have escaped me, but I do not recall the portrait of a single saint with wings in the Scriptures. Elijah disappeared in a chariot of fire. Moses died like a disappointed man. When they reappeared in that cloud of witnesses, it was a cloud; nothing recorded of their wings. After Jesus was transfigured, He ascended into heaven. No need of wings.

I think it is probably the mortal imaginations of our preachers and artists have added this doctrine of wings to saints, because they felt obliged to illustrate by the familiar symbol of feathers the _modus vivendi_ of immortality to mortal minds. On the contrary, the one authoritative description of how we rise from the dust discreetly records that our corruption puts on incorruption and this body shall be raised a spiritual body. Only angels, those earlier messengers sent to men, are recorded as having wings. I do not suppose these beings ever were in the flesh. I doubt if they are of the same stuff we shall be. It would not surprise me if they turned out to be the mere birds of heaven, and that the saints will be stepping around as usual, very light on their feet, maybe, but wingless.

I do not recommend this idea to others, but to me it is comforting. I have always felt the need of having something firm to rest upon, even when I tuck the head of my spirit beneath the wings of my imagination and pass into a heavenly reverie. I am psychologically opposed to being up in the mere air, here or hereafter.

The minds we have make slaves of us. We build a city or take one. We make laws, establish our institutions and our covetousness in commerce. We call this a civilization; but it is nothing, no more than the dream of a transient world that never stands the tests of the great realities which remain unshaken in us beyond all our knowledge and powers assumed. It is invariably destroyed, blown away before the wind of some change in our minds. And we lie at last buried deep in the dust of our endeavors. But nothing sleeps in the dust. It must rise and live again. So do we come up from the dark wilderness of these disorders and start all over again after the pattern of our own minds. Another dream, in which men walk like somnambulists for centuries to the same doom of death and dust regardless of God, even when we call it a Christian civilization, missing the way, the truth, and the life as we did before.

The importance we attach to the workings of the merely mortal mind seems to me to approach madness. If for one moment we could escape from the illusion created by our own faculties, we should perceive that we make of ourselves the fools of all creation. The sense to live is the only wit that really counts, and we have less of that than any other creature. We have only the sense to overcome, achieve, and to destroy. A flea knows where to hop, but we do not know. A dog knows the way home, but the smarter a man is the more likely he is to lose his way home. He can only think, believe, hope; but he does not know the simplest things that the beasts of the field never have to learn. He will drink from a pool that a thirsty ass will pass by because the ass knows the water is polluted.

The very earth has more sense than we ever show. It is not inanimate, but contains and uses all the elements we call brains without having them incased as ours are in a small bone shell. The life that springs green and silent from its breast is more obedient to law than we are, and survives us. It knows a joy and peace in living that we never learn. We are foolish to think the trees are not wise because they do not speak.

I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all, but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows that it will rise from the dead in the next season’s sun, breathe, feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such tragedy as we do of death. Their knowledge is better than our faith in immortality. We make a religion and an anguish of doubts about an incident which all Nature, every Scripture, and our own instincts prove is a senseless anxiety. We do live again in the spirit if the very dust rises again in myriad forms of beauty and strength.

But no scientist would offer such evidence. He must think it out, when this is something which cannot be thought, but must be accepted as we take our breath from the air without arguing about it. And the very theologians will throw up their hands in pious horror at such an idea, give it a bad name like pantheism, as if this was the name of a peculiarly damnable heresy.

My notion is that it is not our heresies but our sins that damn us, and no Christian name we apply to them will save us. I am no pantheist; I am one of those humbler, more transient manifestations of the will of God. The grass outlives me, the rose outblooms in blossoms that praise Him better than mortal deeds, and I know the stars outshine me, no matter how immortal I am. As a spirit clothed in celestial light, I doubt if I should amount to more than one short beam in a universe filled with the brilliance of His glory.

To me, it appears sillily egotistical to give ourselves such airs about being immortal. Everything else is. The very stones are fertile and furnish elements indispensable to life. We, indeed, are the only created forms of life that entertain trembling, despairing doubts about that. We are even stupid and narrow-minded when our lid comes off and we go insane. We stick to the beaten tracks of the mortal mind, no real imagination in our delusions. The asylums are filled with men and women who believe themselves to be kings and queens or some other great mortals. I have never heard of one who imagined himself a disembodied spirit. The nearest they ever come to that is by claiming to be disastrous prophets. I have never heard of one who had the glory of madness to believe himself a majestic oak or even a blade of grass. The nearest approach I recall was the poor young lunatic who thought he was a grain of corn and invariably took to his heels at the sight of a chicken. We show too many evidences of ignominy to give ourselves airs, sane or insane.

If I should take leave of my senses while I am still in the flesh--for I do not expect to need such senses when I am finally in the spirit, any more than flowers take thought to bloom--I hope I shall swing out into a more becoming conceit than the notion that I am an article of diet suitable for a hen, or even the Queen of Sheba. I have my doubts about whether she was all she should have been, or she could not have been traipsing after a man with Solomon’s notorious reputation. My vanity would be better served with the delusion of being an ever-blooming rose. As it is, I suffer sometimes from the vague regret that I missed blooming at the right time, the weather of my years being inclement then and unsuited to mere happiness.

But this record will prove that I had my delusions along with the rest of my kind, and that though time and experience destroy the dearest illusions, we do cling to the last to whatever delusion we adopt. It is a bondage of the mind which we work up and strengthen year by year until nothing remains but a terrible obedience.

What amazes me now is the shrewdness with which I avoided various forms of bondage by which women are so frequently defeated in their pursuit of happiness.