If there can be any art of living, any ordering of life to yield us the richest and deepest experiences from this strange adventure into self-consciousness, it is evident that the individual has got to decide what for him or her are the abiding values in life. As it is, our minds are apt to be like the first page of a newspaper in which a home run by Babe Ruth may get the same space as the fall of an empire. If we stopped to consider sanely what for each of us are the real values in life, ranging them in order of significance and importance for us, might not many of us find that they do not consist at all in the things we are striving for? Might we not throw away many of the tools which everyone is using thoughtlessly and habitually merely because everyone else is? We would have seen that they do not produce any such thought or emotion as should fit into that unique production which is our own individual life. For one of the fundamental differences between a work of art and a machine product is that the former is unique. All art involves a selection according to a scale of values. The camera may render the total detail of a landscape with more exactitude than a painter, but the latter selects the details and then through his technique and his own personality he produces a work of art which has a unique and artistic quality. Is it, perhaps, that the material for an art of life is so vast and our tools have become so numerous that there is no possibility of an artistic ordering of our experience? Has it all become too complex and are we reduced to a chaotic and disordered succession of thoughts and emotions? If not, then the artist in life must do just as any other does, learn his technique of production, the proper use of his tools and material to produce a definite result at which he aims, and[Pg 294] rigidly reject all which does not contribute to the one work of art of which he has seen the vision. That is, perhaps, one of the greatest difficulties in the way of an art of life in America. We mix up our money and motor cars and relationships and all the rest of our “tools” as thoughtlessly as a painter might squeeze all his tubes of color onto his canvas, and we get as a result the same sort of daub, in terms of life. Or we are like children striking the notes of a piano at random and achieving the same jangle in life that they do in sound. We select and reject mainly as governed by income. We do so because we have no scale of values, and we have no values because we have no idea what sort of life we really wish to live to express our individuality.