taken to task by a yet wealthier neighbor on the score that, again, “a man in his position” owed it to his wife to give her a better car than a Dodge sedan to make calls in, though both my friend and the wife preferred to spend their money in other ways than in running a Packard or a Cadillac. Spending one’s money in one’s own way in America—that is, trying to use the tools of life with sanity and discrimination—is a good deal like running the old Indian gauntlet. The self-appointed monitors of society to tell other people how they should live, ran, in the cases above, all the way from village store-keepers to a successful New York business man worth many millions, but they are merely typical of that pressure, express or implied, that is brought to bear on any individual who attempts to think out and live his own life. But if our lives are to be based on any art of living, if our souls are not to be suppressed and submerged under a vast heap of standardized plumbing, motor cars, crack schools[Pg 302] for the children, suburban social standards and customs, fear of group opinion, and all the rest of our mores and taboos, then the first and most essential factor is courage, the simple courage to do what you really want to do with your own life. But if courage, especially in America, is essential to an art of living, thought is fundamental. A man has got to think out what sort of life he really wants, what life he is going to try to make for himself. If he refuses to face that problem and merely drifts, he abandons himself to the mould that his neighbors provide for him. He will become both for himself and others the utterly uninteresting nonentity that so many Americans are, simply because they have taken the line of least resistance and become mere replicas of thousands of their fellows. When you have seen one Ford car turned out any year, you have seen the whole four million, or whatever the number is. They may be very good and very useful and very sturdy, but they cannot have the slightest interest as individual specimens for anyone.