American essays -- 20th century; Child development; Children; Education
When we came back the second summer, we found that a bullet had broken
Jack's right front leg. He had wintered out at times, had known much
pain. It was not that he did not have good friends who would have taken
him in, but I think Jack lost faith a bit in the pain and stress. There
was grey about his muzzle. One day he sat in the centre of the little
Chapel class.
"I'd like to be as good a man as Jack is a dog," one of the boys said.
"You'd be one more man," said another.
The fact is Jack has filled his circle rather well. This thought came
to me presently with fuller meaning. I regarded him with knowledge of
three seasons. A clean dog, a gentleman, a master of himself, very
courageous and slow to anger, impossible for small children to anger--a
dog among dogs, but more than dog among men.
"He _has_ filled his circle," I said aloud. "What makes a man look less
in these very virtues that Jack has mastered, is that a man's circle
is larger, and he has not reached the time of fulfilment as Jack has.
If the dog's accomplishments were suddenly lifted from his circle
and placed in a larger one, we would not be conscious of the fine
integration of virtues that keep us interested now."
Men, lost in the complications of cities, yearn for the simplicity of
their early days on the farms; and yet they could not go back. The
simplicity they yearn for is ahead. That of the old country days is but
a symbol of the cosmic simplicity in store for us. Tolstoi turned back
to the peasants, yet the simplicity he craved was not there.
The peasants are merely potential of what the New Race will be; the
peasants themselves must suffer the transition--must have their circle
widened and feel their little laws and their little sense of order
suddenly diffused over broad, strange surfaces. Their cosmic simplicity
will appear when the larger dimension is put in order. That which is
lovely in any plane of being, is that which is in flower--when it
has about filled its present circle. We are not less, intrinsically,
because our values are placed in a larger vessel, though we have a
renovating sense of our own insignificance. There is an order of small
men, so obviously a part of their very narrowness, that it becomes
instantly repulsive to larger souls. Many of the latter have flashed
off to the end of their tether for the time, preferring chaos, to the
two by two neatness of small-templed men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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