The Wonders About Us

1910

Let not care and humdrum deaden us to the wonders and mysteries amid which we live, nor to the splendors and glories. We need not translate ourselves in imagination to some other sphere or state of being to find the marvelous, the divine, the transcendent; we need not postpone our day of wonder and appreciation to some future time and condition. The true inwardness of this gross visible world hanging like an apple on the bough of the great cosmic tree, and swelling with all the juices and potencies of life, transcends anything we have dreamed of superterrestrial abodes. — John Burroughs.

Books — The Best Friends

1920

THE BEST FRIENDS
by Sidney Dark, in John O'London's Weekly

When once the love of books has come into a man's life he can never be lonely, he can never be bored, he can never lose his interest in life, he can never be quite unhappy. Books are the friends that never fail, and the men and women that only live in books are the best and the most real friends of all.

The happy life is not spent altogether in the world of streets and shops and offices. A large part of it must be lived in the world of imagination. And living with the imaginings of great writers, we, too, learn to dream and the happiest homes in the world are the castles in the air that we build for ourselves. They are, indeed, the only homes the foundations of which are unshakable rocks.

Civilization is Destroying Poetry, Humor

1906--

DECAY OF IMAGINATION.

Assertion Made That Civilization Not Only Killing Poetry, But Sense of Humor.

An Italian scientist thinks that civilization is not only killing poetry, but the sense of humor. Both depend upon the seen object suggesting other things to the mind, in one case congruous, in the other incongruous. Science has made our minds more rigid so that we see only what we see. "More rigid" means less vitalized.

Under new conditions at hand, we shall get back our vitality, shall once more have some to spare, once more be able to see the naked visible in its proper robes. Imagination is the seeing of real relations. It is seeing what we feel ought to be, which, when sane, is a deeper seeing of what they are. Humor is imagination relaxing herself and playing the caricaturist. While she lives at all, she must be permitted to recreate. She thrives on the surplus age of mental vitality.

Nordau dwells somewhere on the tendency of artists he calls degenerate to paint everything more or less violet. One would suppose that every color, like every sound, must be yielding its overtones. Any one can see the color as it stands. It takes an artist to see--feel, "Imagine"--its overtones and bring them down for us.-Student in the New Century.

--The Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma, August 9, 1906, page 4.