Lifes Enthusiasms | Page 8

her own poets have styled her,
and on no other city since the world began has fate, unmalicious,
mechanical and elemental, wrought such a terrible havoc. In a day this
city has vanished; the shock of a mighty earthquake forgotten in an
hour in the hopeless horror of fire; homes, hotels, hospitals, hovels,
libraries, museums, skyscrapers, factories, shops, banks and gambling
dens, all blotted out of existence almost in the twinkling of an eye;
millionaires, beggars, dancers and workers, men great and small,
foolish and courageous, with their women and children of like natures
with them, fleeing together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands
to the hills and the sand-dunes, where on the grass and the shifting
sands they all slept together or were awake together in the old primal
equality of life. Never since man began to plan and to create has there
been such a destruction of the results of human effort. Never has a great
calamity been met with so little repining. Never before has the common
man shown himself so hopeful, so courageous, so sure of himself and
his future. For it is the man, after all, that survives and it is the will of
man that shapes the fates.
It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and
cannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he
stands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing to
build a great city. Men can do this in a quarter century, working
together each at his own part. More wonderful still is it to be a city, for
a city is composed of men, and now, ever and forever the man must rise
above his own creations. That which is in the man is greater than all
that he can do.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud

Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloody but not bowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the
shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me
unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments
the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul!"
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