Living the Radiant Life: A Personal NarrativeJames, George Wharton
Religion
Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative
James, George Wharton
Conduct of life
I firmly believe and wish to radiate my belief that God has as much use
for the man of the farm as for the man of the drawing-room; the rudeness
of "The man with the hoe" as the smoothness of the man with the higher
education. He needs the arid desert as well as the fertile plain; the
wild ruggedness of the ravine as well as the cultivated garden; the
colorless abysses of the glacier as well as the flower-besprinkled
foothills. He has use for the snowy plains of the north as well as the
rice fields of the south; the cactus as well as the orchid; the giant
suaharo as well as the shrinking gilia; the prickly pear, as the velvety
peach; the sword-fish, as the nautilus; the shark as the flying-fish;
the flaming sunrises and sunsets, as the tender tints of the lily, and
the night-blooming cereus; the deep purples, as well as the blush rose;
the glowing yellows as the softer blues; the piercing greens as the
quieter violets. The bluffs and promontories that thrust their heads out
into the ocean are as much a part of God's great out-of-doors and of as
much use as are the placid landscapes; the mountain heights as much
needed as are the flower-bespangled levels; the vast reaches of prairie
as the secluded and confined valley. The piercing cold of the Arctic has
as much a place in Nature as the alluring mildness of Southern
California or the Riviera; the monster tides of the Bay of Fundy as the
ripples of the placid pool.
The sturdy and warlike Viking has as much a place in history as the
diplomatic and artistic Italian; the Negro as the Caucasian; the
Chinaman as the French; the Oriental as the English; the Japanese as the
American.
El Capitan and Gibraltar are not exquisitely carved statues by Canova or
Thorwaldsen, but they have just as much a place in the history of the
world's development.
The wilds of the high Sierras, in all their rude and majestic splendor,
rugged and tremendous vastness, where clear-eyed, horny-handed,
strong-oathed, and rudely clad men wander and labor, are very different
from the city drawing-rooms,--those places of pink teas and white
kid-gloved men and women; those breeding places of superficial
conventionality and effete conceptions of people and life, but I doubt
not that the high Sierras have produced more of benefit to mankind than
all the drawing-rooms of all the civilizations.
I love the pastoral and quiet landscapes of the Connecticut River
Valley, of placid Killarney, of the quiet vale of Avoca, of picturesque
Normandy, but the passion, power, majesty, sublimity, solitude,
dreariness and desolation of the far-reaching Colorado Desert, deep
descending Grand Canyon, bold escarpments of the Red Rock country, and
other tremendous and solitary places of Nature command me, allure me,
appeal to me, and dominate me quicker than the quiet places of beauty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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