Admitted into our consciousness it
starts its work of killing us. It wrinkles the face, it turns the hair
grey, it enfeebles the limbs, it stupefies the brain. One of its most
deadly weapons is fatigue, or the simulation of fatigue. The tired
business man, who rules American life, is oftener than not a dead
business man. If he looked ahead he would see what we idiomatically know
as his "finish." He is not only dying but he infuses death into
manners, literature, and art, since he so largely sets the standard
which becomes the rule.
War on the death-principle should be, it seems to me, one of the aims to
which the individual gives his strength; and once more he can do it on
his own account.
In the first place, he can watch himself, that he does not mentally
begin to grow old. To begin mentally to grow old is to begin mentally to
die. He must think of himself as an expanding being, not as a
contracting one. He must keep in sympathetic touch with the new, damning
the know-it-all frame of mind. He must keep in sympathetic touch with
youth, knowing that youth is the next generation in advance. The secrets
of one generation are not those of another; but if he who possesses the
earlier masters also the later he is that much the richer and wiser. The
gulf which separates parents and children is one which the parents must
cross.
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