Horizons

IT was a fresh midsummer morning, the wind in the willows and the chirp of birds the only sounds to break the Sabbath stillness, except the splash of water with which the farmer was sousing a very mud-caked wagon in preparation for taking his wife and some summer boarders to meeting. Indoors the rite of exchanging calico for the more sabbatical silk was going on. But one youthful boarder in everyday attire was setting out on the road, not in the direction the wagon was to take.

I was not going to meeting on that superb morning, even though the date was one remote from the present age of Sunday freedom, a period in which the very air stiffened once a week to admonition. The day had set itself apart for me, from the first raising of the curtains between us, to another end and purpose.

Half a mile from the house, four or five roads strayed together in a grassy space, with ancient gray sign-boards, tilted at different angles, and pointing with half-obliterated finger to places three eighths of a mile, five miles, fourteen miles, away. On any other day I should have paused to consult them, to be duped by their estimate of distance or lured by the charm of a name. But to-day I went on at random. No road led whither I was going, no sign-board pointed to the thing I sought, but at any turn in the woods, over the edge of any hill, its glory might come to meet me.

The wayside was thick with our New England wayside vegetation, all fresh and dewy: ferns, berries, flowers, in swampy or sandy succession. Birds flew on busy errands, broke into little outbursts of song among the bushes, flashed to an eye trained in bird’s-nesting a familiar gleam of white feathers, a well-known dip or curve of flight, or stirred an instinctive curiosity by some unrecognized trait and the rustle of unknown wings in the foliage. But I was neither hunting for birds, nor botanizing, nor picking berries. I was out in search of truth.

That I occupied myself on that high errand with anything worthy the name of thought,far be it from me to affirm. The thoughts of youth may be ‘long, long thoughts,’ but recollection is the parent of a suspicion on my part that they are often fairly empty ones. They belong rather to the order of sensations. If I went through any train of thought as I swung along that country road, it must have been much as a dog rushes through a thicket. I was impelled by happiness and the freshness of the day. I was beckoned by the horizon. I was goaded by misery.

The fact is that in those youthful days all my walks had as their aim the horizon, even if their end were a stone fence or the grocery store. To that rim of earth and the unearthly, to that contact of matter with light, all my problems were brought; its aspect held consolation, reassurance, promise; and once in a long time something more. Sometimes I did all the talking, and the horizon was mute; we got nowhere on that day. But when the quivering of wounded personality subsided, when silence and receptiveness had their little hour, there were things said over there that helped.

To one who builds his hopes on the horizon an upward path, even if not an open one, is an invitation, I took a logging road that led up a hill, the nearest approach to a mountain that the region afforded. It led me through the woods into a clearing on the hill-top, a little circular clearing filled with stones, raspberry bushes, and fire-weed; trees all around, a little below me, but narrowing my horizon to a curve of waving tree-tops only a few yards away.

Seated on a pile of logs I looked out over the fire-weed and raspberry bushes to the horizon of oak and birch. Then I looked mentally at the horizons beyond, over the curve of our earth with its fields and woods, its churches and houses, its working, praying, sinning, suffering people; over the world of books, — like the other, guessed rather than known. What was the meaning of it all? What stood out in it? What of all its realities was the most real, of all its dreams the least delusive?

There was light, poured down upon all, alternating with darkness, shining through and around it, a gift of the whole to each one. There was truth, coming to us in divers ways, in the scattered variety of things true: this true for one mind, that, for another. There was goodness, shining through peoples’ faces and in their lives, making them something to look up to and reverence. The light could be struck with a match, the goodness could belong to the ignorant and unthinking, the truth might or might not be really true. But could any light, any truth, any goodness, exist, if there were not the abstract realities, light, truth, goodness, — all that we see, a fragment or a mere reflection of them? Was not that real existence, God?

I don’t offer it as a final philosophy, this interview of a small mind of seventeen with the horizon of a raspberry patch. But at the moment, and more or less for some time afterwards, it was to me one of the things that counted.