American essays -- 20th century; Child development; Children; Education
The Little Girl's ideal is to do great stories. They challenge her by
their very difficulty. When I see where she stands now, and think of
the far ways we elders went to learn the game; when I see what the
twenty-year-olds are doing now, how they command their mysticism--a
harder task for me than the accomplishment of physical results; when I
see the inner bloom and co-ordination and the inimitable surfaces which
come to all the arts by the development of the soul life first, the
listening for the Master within--I want to get my hands on them all,
upon all the young builders of the New Race. I want at once to awaken
within them the Spectator--the One who cannot be swung back and forth
in the pairs of opposites, who cannot give himself to the partisans,
who has glimpsed the Plan and offers it full adoration, who says
accordingly that the best possible thing that can happen is the thing
that happens next. These are the young Players who will reveal life by
living it--portray life as naturally as breathing, whose equipment is
not possessions, not even brain possessions, but spiritual _en rapport_
with all, oneness with all life.
I remember struggling for effects. These young people breathe
effects. I remember style as a studied attainment. These young people
acknowledge but one style--that is being one's self.... I want to set
many of them free from within outward. In their gladness at the finding
of themselves, they will go forth to include the world; they will bring
to it the compassion which enfolds all, reveals all.... Love the world
well and you will understand it. Love the world well, and you will
write well to it. Give it yourself, and the world is yours.
* * * * *
15
WORK IN SHORT STORIES
The Little Girl sketched this impression of an Indian Summer Dusk:
* * * * *
... Just now the great blue dusk, after an Indian summer day. It
deepens and seems to laugh, then all is night. Huge black clouds roll
up, promising a storm. Against them, tall, selfish, unafraid, stand
the poplar trees. The great Mother of the dusk is singing, the God in
Nature is singing, and Nature's belongings, all of them, sing in this
magical moment. One feels it all in one's self, feels the glory, the
romance, the very core-life of the Universe. The matings too, taking
place in the grass and air; the matings of the two streams, the two
grains of sand; the matings of butterflies, birds and bees. It all
flows through one's body like music and honey and sunshine....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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