Adventures in Contentment | Page 3

these
hills, this field about me, the woods, had suddenly spoken to me and
caressed me. It was as though I had been accepted in membership, as
though I was now recognised, after long trial, as belonging here.
Across the town road which separates my farm from my nearest
neighbour's, I saw a field, familiar, yet strangely new and unfamiliar,
lying up to the setting sun, all red with autumn, above it the
incalculable heights of the sky, blue, but not quite clear, owing to the
Indian summer haze. I cannot convey the sweetness and softness of that
landscape, the airiness of it, the mystery of it, as it came to me at that
moment. It was as though, looking at an acquaintance long known, I
should discover that I loved him. As I stood there I was conscious of
the cool tang of burning leaves and brush heaps, the lazy smoke of
which floated down the long valley and found me in my field, and
finally I heard, as though the sounds were then made for the first time,
all the vague murmurs of the country side--a cow-bell somewhere in
the distance, the creak of a wagon, the blurred evening hum of birds,
insects, frogs. So much it means for a man to stop and look up from his
task. So I stood, and I looked up and down with a glow and a thrill

which I cannot now look back upon without some envy and a little
amusement at the very grandness and seriousness of it all. And I said
aloud to myself:
"I will be as broad as the earth. I will not be limited."
Thus I was born into the present world, and here I continue, not
knowing what other world I may yet achieve. I do not know, but I wait
in expectancy, keeping my furrows straight and my corners well turned.
Since that day in the field, though my fences include no more acres,
and I still plow my own fields, my real domain has expanded until I
crop wide fields and take the profit of many curious pastures. From my
farm I can see most of the world; and if I wait here long enough all
people pass this way.
And I look out upon them not in the surroundings which they have
chosen for themselves, but from the vantage ground of my familiar
world. The symbols which meant so much in cities mean little here.
Sometimes it seems to me as though I saw men naked. They come and
stand beside my oak, and the oak passes solemn judgment; they tread
my furrows and the clods give silent evidence; they touch the green
blades of my corn, the corn whispers its sure conclusions. Stern
judgments that will be deceived by no symbols!
Thus I have delighted, secretly, in calling myself an unlimited farmer,
and I make this confession in answer to the inner and truthful demand
of the soul that we are not, after all, the slaves of things, whether corn,
or banknotes, or spindles; that we are not the used, but the users; that
life is more than profit and loss. And so I shall expect that while I am
talking farm some of you may be thinking dry goods, banking,
literature, carpentry, or what-not. But if you can say: I am an unlimited
dry goods merchant, I am an unlimited carpenter, I will give you an
old-fashioned country hand-shake, strong and warm. We are friends;
our orbits coincide.

II

I BUY A FARM
As I have said, when I came here I came as a renter, working all of the
first summer without that "open vision" of which the prophet Samuel
speaks. I had no memory of the past and no hope of the future. I fed
upon the moment. My sister Harriet kept the house and I looked after
the farm and the fields. In all those months I hardly knew that I had
neighbours, although Horace, from whom I rented my place, was not
infrequently a visitor. He has since said that I looked at him as though
he were a "statute." I was "citified," Horace said; and "citified" with us
here in the country is nearly the limit of invective, though not violent
enough to discourage such a gift of sociability as his. The Scotch
Preacher, the rarest, kindest man I know, called once or twice, wearing
the air of formality which so ill becomes him. I saw nothing in him: it
was my fault, not his, that I missed so many weeks of his friendship.
Once in that time the Professor crossed my fields with his tin box slung
from his shoulder; and the only feeling I had, born of crowded cities,
was that this was an