These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large, unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days these young men perform automatically. My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness--the American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness above this--where intuitions play and weave causes and effects together--where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more like a giant's, perhaps--where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if at all. Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It became clear as daylight--that a man is at his best only when out of himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward. Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force. Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools and materials in black and white--just intimations.... If we are sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two words suggest it best. The first is _Comrade_, which has become a silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the years--or avoided using it--until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear--its meaning in work and world and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.