The Joyful Heart | Page 4

discovery--with possibilities, even, of a
developing imagination. For the Auto-Comrade, your better self, is a
magician. He can get something out of nothing.
At this stage of your development you will probably discover in
yourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to
enable you to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you
wander through your mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come
upon an ugly intruder of a thought which might bloom into some
poisonous emotion such as fear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like,
there is only one right way to treat it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on
the rubbish heap as if it were a stinging nettle; and let some harmonious
thought grow in its place. There is no more reckless consumer of all
kinds of exuberance than the discordant thought, and weeding it out
saves such an amazing quantity of eau de vie wherewith to water the
garden of joy, that every man may thus be his own Burbank and
accomplish marvels of mental horticulture.
When you have won physical and mental exuberance, you will have
pleased your Auto-Comrade to such an extent that he will most likely
startle and delight you with a birthday present as the reward of virtue.
Some fine morning you will climb out of the right side of your bed and
come whistling down to breakfast and find by your plate a neat packet
of spiritual exuberance with his best wishes. Such a gift is what the true
artist enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and full for a dozen pens

or brushes to record. Jeanne d'Arc knew it when the mysterious voices
spoke to her; and St. John on Patmos; and every true lover at certain
moments; and each one of us who has ever flung wide the gates of
prayer and felt the infinite come flooding in as the clean vigor of the
tide swirls up through a sour, stagnant marsh; or who at some supreme
instant has felt enfolding him, like the everlasting arms, a sure
conviction of immortality.
Now for purposes of convenience we may speak of these three kinds of
exuberance as we would speak of different individuals. But in reality
they hardly ever exist alone. The physical variety is almost sure to
induce the mental and spiritual varieties and to project itself into them.
The mental kind looks before and after and warms body and soul with
its radiant smile. And even when we are in the throes of a purely
spiritual love or religious ecstasy, we have a feeling--though perhaps it
is illusory--that the flesh and the intellect are more potent than we
knew.
These, then, constitute the first three parts of the joy-digesting
apparatus. I think there is no need of dwelling on their efficacy in
helping one to enjoy achievement. Let us pass, therefore, to the fourth
and last part, which is self-restraint.
Perhaps the worst charge usually made against achievement is its
sameness, its dry monotony. On the way to it (the writers say) you are
constantly falling in with something new. But, once there, you must
abandon the variegated delights of yesterday and settle down, to-day
and forever, to the same old thing. In this connection I recall an
epigram of Professor Woodrow Wilson's. He was lecturing to us young
Princetonians about Gladstone's ability to make any subject of
absorbing interest, even a four hours' speech on the budget. "Young
gentlemen," cried the professor, "it is not the subject that is dry. It is
you that are dry!" Similarly, it is not achievement that is dry; it is the
achievers, who fondly suppose that now, having achieved, they have no
further use for the exuberance of body, mind, and spirit, or the
self-restraint which helped them toward their goal.
Particularly the self-restraint. One chief reason why the thing attained

palls so often and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy it immoderately.
Why, if Ponce de Leon had found the fountain of youth and drunk of it
as bibulously as we are apt to guzzle the cup of achievement, he would
not only have arrested the forward march of time, but would have
over-reached himself and slipped backward through the years of his age
to become a chronic infant in arms. Even traveling hopefully would
pall if one kept at it twenty-four hours a day. Just feast on the rich food
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony morning, noon, and night for a few
months, and see how you feel. There is no other way. Achievement
must be moderately indulged in, not made the pretext for a debauch. If
one has achieved a new cottage, for example, let him take numerous
week-end vacations from it. And let not an author sit down and read
through his own book