And I have often marvelled at the
impudence of gentlemen who describe and pass judgment
on the life of man, in almost perfect ignorance of all
its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who
dwell in clubs and studios may paint excellent pictures
or write enchanting novels. There is one thing that
they should not do: they should pass no judgment on
man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are
unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the
moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass
and disappear. The eternal life of man, spent under
sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one
side, scarce changed since the beginning.
I would I could have carried along with me to Midway
Island all the writers and the prating artists of my
time. Day after day of hope deferred, of heat, of
unremitting toil; night after night of aching limbs,
bruised hands, and a mind obscured with the grateful
vacancy of physical fatigue. The scene, the nature of
my employment, the rugged speech and faces of my
fellow-toilers, the glare of the day on deck, the
stinking twilight in the bilge, the shrill myriads of
the ocean-fowl; above all, the sense of our immitigable
isolation from the world and from the current epoch--
keeping another time, some eras old; the new day
heralded by no daily paper, only by the rising sun; and
the State, the churches, the peopled empires, war, and
the rumours of war, and the voices of the arts, all
gone silent as in the days ere they were yet invented.
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