Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making
money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he
can do it makes people feel about the world. Whenever I have a little
space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does
not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"--I say
to myself cheerfully--"I can go down to New York and slip into Non's
office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on. Or he
will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or
idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good
long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he
tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico's for three hours
how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works." Sometimes when I have
just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still
study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and
all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself,
lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he
is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and inside of
their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a
thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadows
and little visions of words fall together just so, seems, suddenly a
very trivial occupation--like amusing one's self with a pretty little
safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it and shaking softly one's
coloured bits of phrases at a world! Of course, it need not be so. But
there are moments when I think of Non when it seems so.
In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at our best
just now.
At least (perhaps I should speak for one) I know I am not.
Being a saint of late is getting to be a kind of homely, modest,
informal, almost menial everyday thing. It makes one more hopeful about
religion. Perhaps people who once get the habit, and who are being good
all the week, can even be good on Sunday.
There are many ways of resting or leaning back upon one's instincts and
getting over to one's religion or perspective about the world. Mount Tom
(which is in my front yard, in Massachusetts) helps sometimes--with a
single look.
When I go down to New York, I look at the Metropolitan Tower, the
Pennsylvania Station, the McAdoo Tunnels, and at Non.
If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get him to work in
Non's office, or work with anybody who ever worked with him, or who ever
saw him; or I would have him live in a house built by him, or pay a bill
made out by him.
It has seemed to me that his succeeding and making himself succeed in
this way is a great spiritual adventure, a pure religion, a difficult,
fresh, and stupendous religion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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