Ethics -- Fiction; Religion and sociology -- Fiction; Upper class families -- Fiction
I have mentioned my inability to depict the terrible struggle that went
on in my soul. It seems strange that Nietzsche--that most ruthless of
philosophers to the romantic mind!--should express it for me. "The genius
of the heart, from contact with which every man goes away richer, not
'blessed' and overcome,....but richer himself, fresher to himself than
before, opened up, breathed upon and sounded by a thawing wind; more
uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more bruised; but full of hopes which
as yet lack names, full of a new will and striving, full of a new
unwillingness and counterstriving."....
Such was my experience with Hermann Krebs. How keenly I remember that new
unwillingness and counter-striving! In spite of the years it has not
wholly died down, even to-day....
Almost coincident with these quickenings of which I have spoken was the
consciousness of a hunger stronger than the craving for bread and meat,
and I began to meditate on my ignorance, on the utter inadequacy and
insufficiency of my early education, on my neglect of the new learning
during the years that had passed since I left Harvard. And I remembered
Krebs's words--that we must "reeducate ourselves." What did I know? A
system of law, inherited from another social order, that was utterly
unable to cope with the complexities and miseries and injustices of a
modern industrial world. I had spent my days in mastering an inadequate
and archaic code--why? in order that I might learn how to evade it? This
in itself condemned it. What did I know of life? of the shining universe
that surrounded me? What did I know of the insect and the flower, of the
laws that moved the planets and made incandescent the suns? of the human
body, of the human soul and its instincts? Was this knowledge acquired at
such cost of labour and life and love by my fellow-men of so little worth
to me that I could ignore it? declare that it had no significance for me?
no bearing on my life and conduct? If I were to rise and go forward--and
I now felt something like a continued impulse, in spite of relaxations
and revolts--I must master this knowledge, it must be my guide, form the
basis of my creed. I--who never had had a creed, never felt the need of
one! For lack of one I had been rudely jolted out of the frail shell I
had thought so secure, and stood, as it were, naked and shivering to the
storms, staring at a world that was no function of me, after all. My
problem, indeed, was how to become a function of it....
I resolved upon a course of reading, but it was a question what books to
get. Krebs could have told me, if he had lived. I even thought once of
writing Perry Blackwood to ask him to make a list of the volumes in
Krebs's little library; but I was ashamed to do this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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