The Voice

I

BEING by nature a past-minded man, I have often regretted that I was not born two hundred or, better, five hundred years ago. The longing is, I know, sentimentaland, perhaps, absurd. One wishes to be transported with one’s twentieth-century mind into a fifteenth- or eighteenth-century world — that, is what it amounts to. Why not be content, much more than content, with one’s own age, with the incredible fortune of having been born at all?

I was sitting in Tihoti Sage’s barber shop, in Papeete, having my hair cut. There was no one else in the shop, and Tihoti is a barber in a thousand. He volunteers no news, nor bits of local gossip, unless called upon to do so. If he understands that you are in the mood for talk, no man could be more willing to play his part, but he has the gift of silence, too.

I was in the dreamy frame of mind that often comes over one when the quality of the sunlight is changing from that of early to that of mid afternoon. So far as I can remember, I was thinking of nothing; and I listened to the snip-snip of Tihoti’s shears as though it were a sound born of nothing, existing for itself alone.

Then a voice began to speak to inward consciousness, so clearly that I half believed that Tihoti himself must hear it.

‘Be well content,’ it said. ‘Is it nothing that, out of the limbo of uncreated things, you have, by some chance, been selected for the boon of conscious existence? Think not of the briefness of the time granted you. Waste not a moment in regret. Oh, foolish men! Whatever their misfortunes — and most of them are of their own making — they have escaped by far the greatest: never to have been born at all.’

‘Voilà!’ said Tihoti, removing the cloth from my shoulders and swinging round his chair. ‘Now you are well sheared for another fifteen days.’

It was strange indeed to hear his pleasant, matter-of-fact voice breaking in upon this other. A flood of happiness almost painful came over me; or, better, welled up within me, as though it had always been there, waiting to be tapped. I gave Tihoti his six francs; and, had I possessed it, I would gladly have given him one hundred golden sovereigns for every second of his silence upon this occasion. I left his shop sheared of more than my hair. Samson had lost virtue and strength with his; I — for the time being, at least — only the vice of ungratefulness, of occasional regret that I am not someone other than myself, in some other age than this, in some other place than here.

II

Where is the right place and when the precious moment? Here and now. We all know this with our minds; why can we not always be aware of it with the spirit?

In moments of insight one is abashed, and ashamed ever to have lamented one’s fortune or to have railed at fate. And that any man, in the midst of life, should ever allow himself to be preoccupied with thoughts of death . . . what word is there keen enough to prick him awake, or acid enough to dissolve the thick scaly integument of his folly?

I doubt whether any saint, visionrapt, dreaming of world over worlds, of life beyond life, has known moments of purer happiness than I — anything but a saint — who have never looked beyond this one. I envy no Indian sage, gazing at his navel until he achieves oblivion; I can only wonder that he should wish to achieve it. We Westerners are too ready to believe that others must have gifts more precious than our own. We have the gift above all gifts, that of loving life here and now, even as it is. I would rather be the meanest among us, granted only that he was born whole and that he lives with awakened, receptive faculties, than the greatest of Eastern mystics who, by taking thought or by letting it fall, stands at the portal of the All-Soul.

Is the highest joy in being purely animal? Does it depend upon the chemistry of our bodies and upon that alone? Many say so, and offer what appear to be formidable reasons for believing so. What know I? Only this: —

In past years I have had my full share of those periods of boyish ecstasy when every nerve and fibre and cell of me seemed to be saying, ‘How good it is to live!’ But it was not until I had passed my thirty-fifth year that spirit said, in music, what my body had said in prose. A high quality of prose, the body’s — I grant that; but, since thirty-five, I ‘ have heard the chimes at midnight,’ and I hear them still. I often doubt whether this infinitely higher faculty for enjoyment has anything to do with chemistry.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Traherne told of the glory of the world seen through a child’s eyes. What he then said was said for all time: —

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and reverend things did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty. Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided as they were, in their appointed places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything, appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions; but all properties and divisions were mine: all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

III

Unfortunate, indeed, is the man who has no such vivid and happy memories of his childhood; who has come to middle life trailing no clouds of glory. But I believe, with Wordsworth, that aging men are still the fathers of those children; and, if they have aged well, they enter upon a heritage more precious than that they have lost. We know that we are born and must die, and, against the sombre background of the approaching night, how beautiful appears everything that has life! We have the sense of time which throws every passing moment into clear relief, and we see how more than fair it is. Boys and girls tumbling in the street are moving jewels still. They are like drops of water flung high into the sunny air, the more precious because they may not remain there. Even though racked by pain, or hampered by infirmities or other unfortunate circumstance, — often because of this, — we know how to value the gift of life. And if we are healthy in mind and body, what child in his ignorance and innocence knows happiness comparable to ours?

Does the knowledge that it must end bring a soilure of dust and ashes? The poets say so, but I have observed that they are, usually, the minor poets, not the great singers of the Hymn of Life. It seems a thing they have learned by rote, that they take for granted. From generation to generation they continue saying so, and, at times, one half believes that they have never learned to think and to feel for themselves. They make beauty from this thought. Not the beauty, only the mournful truth — if it is truth to them — is lost upon me. It is as though they were speaking in a language I cannot understand.

This intense joy of life, increasing as one grows older, is not limited to the few and the fortunate. I believe that any man or woman, however harsh his or her lot, is not, or need not be, denied it. However high the walls that appear to shut him in with his wretchedness, let him not forget that they exist only in his own imagination. And I believe that the day comes, if he desires it keenly enough, when he will find himself in the midst of life as he has never seen it before, and the glory will be all that he can bear, at first. Time will be needed to accustom himself to living at this new height.

He may be a drudge in an office, making out invoices, turning the handle of an adding machine. He may be opening and shutting the door of an elevator, saying in a monotonous voice, ‘Third floor: men’s and boys’ clothing, shoes, hats, underwear, neckwear . . .’ He may be shoveling coal a thousand feet below the surface of the earth. He may as easily be she, taking dictation, as she has, year after dusty year, from a man who says: ‘Replying to your favor of January third . . .’ He may be anyone, anywhere; the moment the scales drop from his eyes and it is realized that the seemingly solid walls that hemmed him round were only the scales themselves — then, of a truth, nothing else matters. He can never be truly wretched again.

I remember, that day, upon leaving Tihoti Sage’s barber shop, that the voice resumed speaking after the brief interruption. And I have often wondered, since, whether the parable of Christ being tempted in the wilderness has not been misinterpreted these past two thousand years. What if it were Life and not Satan that showed him all the kingdoms of the earth? I mean no sacrilege in saying that what I saw appeared to be just such a vision as that. And, being human and transitory, I knelt down and worshiped without being asked to do so.