The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies (important of reading books .TXT) 📕

stays me from the search. On the contrary,the less there has been accomplished the more anxious I am; the truth it teaches is that the mind must be lifted out of its old grooves before anything will be certainly begun. Erase the past from the mind—stand face to face with the real now—and work out all anew. Call the soul to our assistance; the soul tells me that outside all the ideas that have yet occurred there are others, whole circles of others.

I remember a cameo of Augustus Caesar—the head of the emperor is graven in delicate lines, and shows the most exquisite proportions. It is a balanced head, a head adjusted to the calmest intellect. That head when it was living contained a circle of ideas, the largest, the widest, the most profound current in his time. All that philosophy had taught, all that practice, experiment, and empiricism had discovered, was familiar to him. There was no knowledge in the ancient world but what was accessible to the Emperor of Rome. Now at this day there are amongst us heads as finely proportioned as that cut out in the cameo. Though these living men do not possess arbitrary power, the advantages of arbitrary power—as far as knowledge is concerned—are secured to them by education, by the printing-press, and the facilities of our era. It is reasonable to imagine a head of our time filled with the largest, the widest, the most profound ideas current in the age.

Augustus Caesar, however great his intellect, could not in that balanced head have possessed the ideas familiar enough to the living head of this day. As we have a circle of ideas unknown to Augustus Caesar, so I argue there are whole circles of ideas unknown to us. It is these that I am so earnestly desirous of discovering.

For nothing has as yet been of any value, however good its intent. There is no virtue, or reputed virtue, which has not been rigidly pursued, and things have remained as before. Men and women have practised self-denial, and to what end? They have compelled themselves to suffer hunger and thirst; in vain. They have clothed themselves in sack cloth and lacerated the flesh.

They have mutilated themselves. Some have been scrupulous to bathe, and some have been scrupulous to cake their bodies with the foulness of years. Many have devoted their lives to assist others in sickness or poverty. Chastity has been faithfully observed, chastity both of body and mind.

Self-examination has been pursued till it ended in a species of sacred insanity, and all these have been of no more value than the tortures undergone by the Indian mendicant who hangs himself up by a hook through his back. All these are pure folly.

Asceticism has not improved the form, or the physical well-being, or the heart of any human being. On the contrary, the hetaira is often the warmest hearted and the most generous. Casuistry and self-examination are perhaps the most injurious of all the virtues, utterly destroying independence of mind. Self-denial has had no result, and all the self-torture of centuries has been thrown away. Lives spent in doing good have been lives nobly wasted. Everything is in vain. The circle of ideas we possess is too limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside our circle as ours are outside those that were pondered over by Augustus Caesar.

The most extraordinary spectacle, as it seems to me, is the vast expenditure of labour and time wasted in obtaining mere subsistence. As a man, in his lifetime, works hard and saves money, that his children may be free from the cares of penury and may at least have sufficient to eat, drink, clothe, and roof them, so the generations that preceded us might, had they so chosen, have provided for our subsistence. The labour and time of ten generations, properly directed, would sustain a hundred generations succeeding to them, and that, too, with so little self-denial on the part of the providers as to be scarcely felt. So men now, in this generation, ought clearly to be laying up a store, or, what is still more powerful, arranging and organising that the generations which follow may enjoy comparative freedom from useless labour. Instead of which, with transcendent improvidence, the world works only for to-day, as the world worked twelve thousand years ago, and our children’s children will still have to toil and slave for the bare necessities of life. This is, indeed an extraordinary spectacle.

That twelve thousand written years should have elapsed, and the human race—able to reason and to think, and easily capable of combination in immense armies for its own destruction—should still live from hand to mouth, like cattle and sheep, like the animals of the field and the birds of the woods; that there should not even be roofs to cover the children born, unless those children labour and expend their time to pay for them; that there should not be clothes, unless, again,time and labour are expended to procure them; that there should not be even food for the children of the human race, except they labour as their fathers did twelve thousand years ago; that even water should scarce be accessible to them, unless paid for by labour! In twelve thousand written years the world has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for its own

comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder with which it fills me. And more wonderful still, if that could be, there are people so infatuated, or, rather, so limited of view, that they glory in this state of things, declaring that work is the main object of man’s existence—work for subsistence—

and glorying in their wasted time. To argue with such is impossible; to leave them is the only resource.

This our earth this day produces sufficient for our existence.

This our earth produces not only a sufficiency, but a superabundance, and pours a cornucopia of good things down upon us. Further, it produces sufficient for stores and granaries to be filled to the rooftree for years ahead. I verily believe that the earth in one year produces enough food to last for thirty. Why, then, have we not enough? Why do people die of starvation, or lead a miserable existence on the verge of it?

Why have millions upon millions to toil from morning to evening just to gain a mere crust of bread? Because of the absolute lack of Organisation by which such labour should produce its effect, the absolute lack of distribution, the absolute lack even of the very idea that such things are possible.

Nay, even to mention such things, to say that they are possible, is criminal with many. Madness could hardly go farther.

That selfishness has all to do with it I entirely deny. The human race for ages upon ages has been enslaved by ignorance and by interested persons whose object it has been to confine the minds of men, thereby doing more injury than if with infected hands they purposely imposed disease on the heads of the people. Almost worse than these, and at the present day as injurious, are those persons incessantly declaring, teaching, and

impressing upon all that to work is man’s highest condition.

This falsehood is the interested superstition of an age infatuated with money, which having accumulated it cannot even expend it in pageantry. It is a falsehood propagated for the doubtful benefit of two or three out of ten thousand, It is the lie of a morality founded on money only, and utterly outside and having no association whatever with the human being in itself.

Many superstitions have been got rid of in these days; time it is that this, the last and worst, were eradicated.

At this hour, out of thirty-four millions who inhabit this country, two-thirds—say twenty-two millions—live within thirty years of that abominable institution the poorhouse. That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet “pauper” is, to me, the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be committed. Each human being, by mere birth, has a birthright in this earth and all its productions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who are injured, and it is not the “pauper”—oh, inexpressibly wicked word!—it is the well-to-do, who are the criminal classes.

It matters not in the least if the poor be improvident, or drunken, or evil in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the inalienable right of every child born into the light. If the world does not provide it freely—not as a grudging gift but as a right, as a son of the house sits down to breakfast—then is the world mad. But the world is not mad, only in ignorance—an interested ignorance, kept up by strenuous exertions, from which infernal darkness it will, in course of time, emerge, marvelling at the past as a man wonders at and glories in the light who has escaped from blindness.