You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience,
of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then, think
only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through
angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself,
whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.
In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to
ourselves. Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. Both
paint the portrait of the YOU on a gold-background. But the
background of the first way is the static One, while in the second
way it means possibles in the plural, genuine possibles, and it has
all the restlessness of that conception.
Noble enough is either way of reading the poem; but plainly the
pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it
immediately suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of
future experience to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at
work. Altho this second way seems prosaic and earthborn in
comparison with the first way, yet no one can accuse it of tough-
mindedness in any brutal sense of the term. Yet if, as pragmatists,
you should positively set up the second way AGAINST the first way,
you would very likely be misunderstood.
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