You will not find it so easy a task as you may think to decide what sort of life you really do want to make. To do so requires a clear mind, independent thinking, and a knowledge of what the infinite variety of goods and values in life are. Most people dream idly a good deal of what they might like but few have either the ability or power to think through what they really do want, given all the conditions of their own selves and their possibilities. It is not only the young girl who does not know what she wants, who dreams one day of becoming an author because “it must be thrilling to live in Greenwich Village and talk to real writers,” and another of becoming a clerk in a store because “it must be wonderful to feel you are really doing something.” The hardheaded[Pg 303] business man who has fought his way up from a shoestring to millions, knows often just as little what he wants, as any number of rich men bored to death with power and leisure can testify. Perhaps as useful a task of education as any would be to teach young people what the possibilities of life are. It may as well be confessed that most people cannot become artists in living. That is not snobbery. It is simple truth. The day may come, if democracy insists on continuing to debase all our spiritual coinage, when anyone may aspire to call himself a poet or a musician or a sculptor. However, that won’t make him one. There is no more reason to expect that anyone can be a genuine artist in life than to expect everyone to be an artist in words or sounds or colors. If we all cannot aspire to become great artists of any sort, however, there is happily room for us as amateurs in any art, if we care about it; and our own happiness, as well as our interest for others, is greatly increased by trying to express, in any art, our own individuality. The other arts are merely tools for the great all-embracing art, that of living, and we cannot refuse to become amateurs in that art without confession of failure as civilized beings. If all this complex, delicate, and, it may as well be confessed, burdensome thing we call civilization is merely to be used to make us more intricate switchboards of automatic stimuli and reactions, then we might as well smash it and be done with it. Its only excuse is in increasing our liberty of choice, our chance to be more individual among a wider range of goods than can the savage or the barbarian.