Open That Door!Ingersoll, R. Sturgis (Robert Sturgis)
Philosophy
Open That Door!
Ingersoll, R. Sturgis (Robert Sturgis)
Books and reading
A loss of sympathy is a horrible thing. The loss of that sympathy which
holds your heart engripped, and makes you feel part and parcel of this
great, moving, turbulent, sorrowing thing we call the World, is as
grievous a loss as can befall any man. It is worse than a separation
from money, friends or family—it is the loss of an individual’s personal
stake in the world. And yet, we see men who have lost and are losing
it. In them we see die that spark of life which has made them an
integral part of all that lives. We see smothered the divine fire of
humanity and godliness. If we consider Nature, including man, as one
great spirit, we feel that those who have lost an embracing sympathy are
apart from that great spirit, are drifting off into the barren deserts
of bewilderment and decay. If we consider men as individual souls
plotting their own destinies, we must see in those who have lost their
intimate touch with the surge of their fellows’ labors, and their
sympathy to the power of beauty, pariahs, true outcasts, apart and
alone.
How great is your appetite for life? How great is your willingness to
break the shell of your prison and liquidate your heart? What prevents
you from throwing open your arms to the universe, accepting and
welcoming the embrace? The embrace of humanity is a glorious thing! It
is the nectar of the gods. Be one with the world, be not a pariah; be
part of the great wave, be not a stagnant pool.
But one hears answers, "I can’t," "I don’t want to," "I’m apart and will
not mingle." Why can’t you? Why won’t you? Why are you apart? Is it
because you are old and mummified? Have you lost your vision, have you
lost your heart, has the world beaten you back, and does life roll too
fast a pace? Has your understanding become blunted? Are you a snob
upon a pedestal of derision? Are your eyes blind to the colors, your
ears deaf to the music, your voice bitter in your companions’ hearing?
Ah, let there be a way out of the prison—there is a door that will lead
you to your youth. Within a man there is always the spark that can be
made to brighten and to break into living flame. There is no
understanding so dense, no spirit so sordid that it cannot be stirred to
awaken to that sympathy for man and nature that is the pass word to the
Kingdom of Life.
"The Kingdom of Life." Those are perhaps hackneyed words, and yet how
many of us seem to be the inheritors of the Kingdom of Death. Live
bodies find no value in dead souls, so let us make our souls aflame and
attain to a realization of life. Where is the match to strike the
light, the key to open the door?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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