I FIRST began to tell my story because I needed to express my thanks for the things that have happened to me. In the beginning I said to someone, this book is going to be my bread-and-butter letter to God. I was ashamed to be saying anything about God seriously and so I had put it in a whimsical deprecating way in order to say it at all.
And because of my ignorance and stupidity, characteristic of a generation that was much too bright and clever, my voyage of discovery had to be a long and dangerous one before it began to dawn on me where my little voice came from, and what the object of my search might have been called by a better-instructed person.
Now it isn’t only the others like me, still too bright to know God and too clever to kneel down, who are, unconsciously, the enemies of faith in God. There is no more time left now for us to learn slowly, because the new and conscious enemies of Christianity are doing their work so fast. But there are people willing actually to die this very afternoon because events have shown them—what they didn’t know before—that they must disbelieve in man’s tyranny, and that they do believe in God’s guidance and in the teachings of Christ, and not in the teachings of antichrist. And there is no time left at all for anyone to learn these things slowly.
A friend of mine in Castine named Mary Camp once remarked to me that nobody in our generation could mention God out loud except as a swearword without feeling as much embarrassment as our parents had felt at the mention of sex. That was true of me and most of my friends, and therefore I had nothing but the incorrect and evasive name of magic or my little voice when I wanted to describe the mysterious inrush of joy which at every time of decision finally came, if I waited selflessly and humbly for it, and told me which way to turn.
Now I have told part of my story, and I certainly want to tell the rest if God wills it and if enemies do not interrupt me. My upstairs workroom in a seacoast village, not very far from Castine, on the North Atlantic, is as peaceful as a monastery. While I am working I can watch the lazy woodfire burning in the fireplace and feel its sweet warmth. Every little while my husband, Dan Hathaway, cheerfully rushes in with a fresh armful of wood and puts on another log. When I get up and walk around the room in the pauses of writing I go to the low mantelpiece over the fireplace and look at the row of little shells which lie there in order, each one separate so it can be seen and admired alone. These little shells came from Mr. Moorman of Captiva Island in Florida. I sent for them one snowy February day a year and a half ago because I saw Mr. Moorman’s advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature, and because I love shells. I remember how exciting it was when the box came, and the fine white Florida sand began to fall out of the tissue paper as I unwrapped them. I laid them out here in a row on the dark slate-colored mantelpiece, and I love to stand and stare at them, and wonder at them for being such perfect little works of art, such enchanting shapes and decorated so stylishly, with delicate fine stripes, dots, and squares of one color upon another. I like to take one in my hand and feel it against my palm and fingers. The shells and the fluttering fire below give forth a calming pleasure in my moments of undue and sometimes painful exaltation in the midst of writing. There is a mystery, and intimacy, and a mignonne charm about the little shells which I feel whenever I go near them; it is something about them which makes them always seem alive, and refreshing to the mind.
After I have stood still and looked at my shells I walk around the room a minute, and when I look through the windows I see the harbor and our apple trees. This is the first cool day of autumn. A northwest wind is whirling around our house, shaking the trees and throwing green apples down on the grass with a thump; one of the wicker garden chairs has been blown upside down. The harbor is an intense, ruffled blue, running under this wind, and where the tide has gone out millions of wild ducks are sitting on the shiny mudflats in the sunlight. Close to my workroom window the slim, tall crab apple tree is almost blinding, it is so bright, its branches filled with ruby-red crab apples.
This is wonderful! How did I come by it? It is another house and another story. Everything is different since Castine. Yet it all began there. For there and then I first began in utter ignorance and naïveté to heed the little voice which spoke to me and told me which way to turn. This story of what happened is my song of praise and thanksgiving for the gift of life and for the little voice which kept on speaking so patiently to me, even though I was inattentive and stupid for so long. It is a song of thanksgiving, because every time I followed the lead of the little voice, even though the way it wanted me to go almost scared the life out of me, the action turned out to be a fertile action, out of which my life unfolded and grew; just as the vine on one end of our brick house, by putting out its small knowing hands, spreads little curving chains of bright-green leaves over the wall, going first one way and then another way, until it spreads knowingly its whole intricate, beautiful pattern all over the wall.
I am certainly much too ignorant still to do anything more than tell my story, and tell what I found. I knew as soon as I found it that it was the real, though unconscious, object of my search. The thing I found is a sequence. It is very simple. First, I looked, and I began to see what was in front of me. Perhaps I looked with more desperateness than a normal person does, for as Mary Webb wrote in Precious Bane, “When you dwell in a house you mis-like, you will look out of a window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.” At any rate, I really looked, and sometimes I think I really saw, as an artist sees, as if it were the first dawn of my life. Then, inevitably, as will happen to anyone who looks as if for the first time, I noticed that what I saw was amazing, beautiful. The beginning of the sequence, then, is, first you see, then you admire. Next admiration leads with the same inevitableness to gratitude, next, gratitude leads to humility, for the person who receives much feels grateful and then humble, because he wonders how he can have deserved such an extravagant kindness. Humility is naturally followed by a feeling of wonder and adoration toward the source of these miracles, the God who made them and put them there. Next I began to realize that marvelous things to look at are only the beginning of admiration. Not only were extraordinary treasures put before me, but, as in everyone else, in me were implemented the senses with which I am made able to respond to them and receive them. My eyes give me the delight of looking at the shapes and colors of shells; my hand, being so alive and aware, gives me the exquisite ability to put out my fingers and hold the shell and feel its shape and quality. I am even so generously supplied with senses that they complement and almost duplicate each other, so that if one is injured another can serve instead. Even if I had no hand, and no hearing, my eyes could bring me the pleasure of shells.
Besides giving me the incredibly subtle devices of the senses, the Mind of God, who imagined and made us, has added the even more intricate, mysterious, and certainly divine gift, the human mind, which widens my understanding and increases my response to the things which are in front of me away beyond the reach of the subtle senses. As if this were not enough, the mind has for companion the heart.
And although everything appears to have been planned to make us feel at home on the earth, and in possession of the earth as our own, our bodies being designed for perfect adjustment to earthly existence, if not at certain times and places for rapturous harmony with it, aren’t we really in the position of guests? We came from we do not know where, and we return we do not know where.
And in that case, what incredibly rude guests! Taking all this for granted, and then complaining, and cursing God and asking for more! Not only that, but even quick to toss it all away if there is any personal flaw or difficulty.
When I thought of our incredible rudeness I tried to think of some way to make amends and it dawned on me then to pray. That, then, is what prayer is for! I thought. It is the natural expression of those who are not so stupid and so rude as to have forgotten that they are guests. Those naïve, medieval people—and they exist always in every generation, usually obscure, unknown, and even ignorant—who begin and end each day in that most beautiful instinctive human attitude, the attitude of the sensitive, courteous guest of God, on their knees with the head bent down before an ever-present God toward whom their hearts open like drooping flowers or like radiant flowers—they are the only people who really understand admiration and gratitude. They know even more than the artists do because they know the whole of the sequence. They know the end as well as the beginning. They do not only see, and admire, and take, and stop there. In recognition of what they have seen, admired, and received, they finish the sequence, they put themselves and their lives into God’s hands to do as He will with them. It seems as if perhaps these are the only people who are civilized enough, in the highest sense, to have been invited to live on the miraculous earth and to wear the miraculous human body.
It is disappointing to realize that the artists and writers, being specially endowed as they are to see and admire, are among the ones responsible for the fatal breaking of the sequence. We fell in love with ourselves and our works, and forgot our manners. We were grateful, but not grateful enough. We became more and more greedy, harder to please, we wanted everything. We never thought of kneeling down and trying to know God’s will. Shockingly arrogant, ill-bred guests, we took what we wanted, if we could get it, whether it was offered to us or not, and we forgot to guard our happiness with humility and prayer. And now the entire miracle of the earth is being stolen by thieves and murderers, and a great part of the human race who possessed too much and took too much for granted is already homeless and enslaved.
If this Dark Age now covering half the earth is destined to engulf all continents and all people for centuries to come, the next new dawn that breaks upon the ruin of today’s world will surely begin to shine with a tender clear light at the moment when some future wanderer lifts up his head and sees something as if for the first time, and pauses to admire, then feels in his breast a kindling fire of gratitude and wonder and then, instinctively following the sequence, falls on his knees to worship the mystery and to give himself to God.
We have lost that sequence, as all spoiled children and spoiled people lose it. Perhaps everything must be erased, and left in darkness for a long time; and perhaps out of the darkness a new and innocent people must emerge before the sequence can be found and lived again. But when the sequence is found by some forerunner of the next Golden Age, and is devoutly believed in again, and is lived again, when buildings like songs of praise rise from it as their foundation, when it is written again, and sung and embroidered and painted again, then those wise, naïve people, children of God, will have found morality again, and morality, laughed at and rejected now by the suicidally clever people, will be seen to be beautiful, miraculous, and the most precious thing in the world, without which we perish.
I love this book and I can hardly bear to leave it now, as I could hardly bear to say good-by to the workmen in Castine, and lock the doors of my house and leave it, that first fall. But I did say good-by to the men, they took their tools home, and a few days later I locked the doors and gave the keys to Lorna and Alvah, and I went away to wait for spring.
When I left it the house was in its most enticing stage, almost but not quite ready, with furniture, books, pictures, toys, games, interesting treasures of all kinds, dumped into it in magnificent confusion. I could not arrange the furniture, nor put anything away, because the painting and papering were not done. The house was like a great Christmas pie all stuffed full of nut meats, plums, raisins, citron, and lemon peel, which I had to leave for a while as if to blend and ripen. Not another thing could be done there until the winter was over. Reluctantly, too, I said good-by to my new friends, Lorna and Alvah, and as we said good-by, Lorna eagerly promised to let me know the first minute that the road into Castine from the Bucksport railroad station was passable in the spring.
I am leaving my story in the same condition as my house was when I left it then. Preliminary things are told, the rest is waiting, it is packed as full as a pie with treasures to be sorted out, examined, and put in order. But the probability of my being free to return to my story in the spring is less certain than the probability was then of my being free to return to my house. Then Alvah and Lorna and I never dreamed of anything except an unusually late snowstorm and a prolonged mud season as possible causes for my being delayed.
