Travels in Philadelphia/A Slice of Sunlight
A SLICE OF SUNLIGHT
About a quarter to 9 in the morning, at this time of year, a slice of our pale primrose-colored March sunlight cuts the bleak air across the junction of Broad and Chestnut streets and falls like a shining knife blade upon the low dome of the Girard Trust Building. Among those towering cliffs of masonry it is hard to see just where this shaving of brightness slips through, burning in the gray-lilac shadows of that stone valley. But there it is, and it always sets me thinking.
Man has traveled far in his strange pilgrimage and solaced himself with many lean and brittle husks. It is curious to think how many of his ingenious inventions are merely makeshifts to render tolerable the hardships and limitations he has imposed upon himself in the name of "civilization." How often his greatest cunning is expended in devising some pathetic substitute for the joy that once was his by birthright! He shuts himself up in beetling gibraltars of concrete, and thinks with pride of the wires, fans and pipes that bring him light, air and warmth. And yet sunshine and sky and the glow of blazing faggots were once common to all! He talks to his friends by telephone, telegraph or machine-written letters instead of in the heart-easing face-to-face of more leisured times. He invents printing presses to do his thinking for him, reels of translucent celluloid to thrill him with vicarious romance. Not until the desire of killing other men came upon him did he perfect the loveliest of his toys—the airplane. How far, in his perverse flight from the natural sources of joy, has his love of trouble brought him!
So it is that one poor, thin, thwarted filament of sunlight, falling for a few precious minutes across a chasmed city street, seems so dazzling a boon and surprise that he passes enchanted on his darkened pavement. Man, how easily you are pleased!
Is there any one, in our alternate moods of bafflement and exultation, who has not brooded on this queer divergence of Life and Happiness? Sometimes we feel that we have been trapped: that Life, which once opened a vista so broad and golden, has somehow jostled and hurried us into a corner, into a narrow treadmill of meaningless gestures that exhaust our spirit and our mirth. In recent years all humanity has been herded in one vast cage of confusion and dread from which there seemed no egress. Now we are slowly, bitterly, perplexedly groping our way out of it. And perhaps in the difficult years of rebuilding each man will make some effort to architect his existence anew, creeping humbly and hopefully a little closer to the fountains of beauty and strength that lie all about us. When did we learn to cut ourselves apart from earth's miracles of refreshment? To wall ourselves in from the sun's great laughter, to forget the flamboyant pageantry of the world? Earth has wisdom for all our follies, healing for all our wounds, dusk and music for all our peevishness. Who taught us that we could do without her? Can you hear the skylark through a telephone or catch that husky whisper of the pines in a dictograph? Can you keep your heart young in a row of pigeonholes? Will you forego the surf of ocean rollers to be serf to a rolltop desk?
Little by little, and in haphazard ways, wisdom comes to a man. No matter how resolutely he shuts his ears, Truth keeps pricking within him. What a futility, what a meanness and paltriness of living this is that would send us hence with all Life's great secrets unlearned, her ineffable beauties unguessed, her great folio only hastily glimpsed. Here is this spinning ball for us to marvel at, turning in an ever-changing bath of color and shadow, blazed with sunshine, drenched with silver rain, leaning through green and orange veils of dusk, and we creep with blinkered eyes along narrow alleys of unseeing habit. What will it profit us to keep a balance at the bank if we can't keep a balance of youth and sanity in our souls? Of what avail to ship carloads of goods north, east, south and west, if we cannot spare time to know our own dreams, to exchange our doubts and yearnings with our friends and neighbors?
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibration of beauty. I can imagine no more fascinating privilege than to be allowed to ransack the desks of a thousand American business men, men supposed to be hard-headed, absorbed in brisk commerce. Somewhere in each desk one would find some hidden betrayal of that man's private worship. It might be some old newspaper clipping, perhaps a poem that had once touched him, for even the humblest poets are stout partisans of reality. It might be a photograph of children playing in the surf, or a little box of fish-hooks, or a soiled old timetable of some queer backwoods railroad or primitive steamer service that had once carried him into his land of heart's desire.
I remember a friend of mine, a man much perplexed by the cares of earth, but slow to give utterance to his inner and tenderer impulses, telling me how he first grasped the meaning and value of these inscrutable powers of virtue that hurl the whole universe daily around our heads in an unerring orbit. For some reason or other—he was writing a book, I think, and sought a place of quiet—he had drifted for some winter weeks to the shore of a southern bay, down in Florida. When he came back he told me about it. It was several years ago, but I remember the odd look in his eyes as he tried to describe his experience. "I never knew until now," he said, "what sunshine and sky meant. I had always taken them for granted before." He told me of the strange sensation of lightness and quiet smiling that had flooded through him in that land where Nature writes her benignant lessons so plainly that all must draw their own conclusions. He told me of sunset flushes over long, purple waters, and of lying on sand beaches wrapped in sunshine, all the problems of human intercourse soothed away in a naked and unquestioning content. What he said was very little, but watching in his eyes I could guess what had happened. He had found more than sunshine and color and an arc of violet sea. He had found a new philosophy, a new strength and realization of the worthiness of life. He had traveled far to find it: it might just as well be learned in Independence Square any sunny day when the golden light falls upon springing grass.
It is strange that men should have to be reminded of these things! How patiently, how persistently, with what dogged and misdirected pluck, they have taught themselves to ignore the elemental blessings of mankind, subsisting instead on pale and wizened and ingenious substitutes. It is like a man who should shoulder for a place at a quick lunch counter when a broad and leisurely banquet table was spread free just around the corner. The days tick by, as busy, as fleeting, as full of empty gestures as a moving picture film. We crowd old age upon ourselves and run out to embrace it, for age is not measured by number of days but by the exhaustion of each day. Twenty days lived at slow pulse, in harmony with earth's loveliness, are longer than two hundred crowded with feverish appointments and disappointments. Many a man has lived fifty or sixty hectic years and never yet learned the unreckonable endlessness of one day's loitering, measured only by the gracious turning of earth and sun. Some one often asks me, "Why don't you wind the clocks?" But in those rare moments when I am sane clocks do not interest me.
Something of these thoughts flashes into my mind as I see that beam of pale and narrow sunlight fallen upon the roof of that bank building. How strange it is, when life is bursting with light and strength, renewing itself every day in color and freshness, that we should sunder ourselves from these great sources of power. With all the treasures of earth at hand, we coop ourselves in narrow causeways where even a sudden knife-edge of brightness is a matter for joyful surprise. As Stevenson once said, it is all very well to believe in immortality, but one must first believe in life. Why do we grudge ourselves the embraces of "Our brother and good friend the Sun"?