The Simple Life | Page 7

of time, and goes wide of the mark.
The man who, to prepare himself the better for walking, should begin
by making a rigid anatomical examination of his means of locomotion,

would risk dislocating something before he had taken a step. You have
what you need to walk with, then forward! Take care not to fall, and
use your forces with discretion. Potterers and scruple-mongers are soon
reduced to inaction. It needs but a glimmer of common sense to
perceive that man is not made to pass his life in a self-centered trance.
And common sense--do you not find what is designated by this name
becoming as rare as the common-sense customs of other days?
Common sense has become an old story. We must have something
new--and we create a factitious existence, a refinement of living, that
the vulgar crowd has not the wherewithal to procure. It is so agreeable
to be distinguished! Instead of conducting ourselves like rational beings,
and using the means most obviously at our command, we arrive, by
dint of absolute genius, at the most astonishing singularities. Better off
the track than on the main line! All the bodily defects and deformities
that orthopedy treats, give but a feeble idea of the humps, the
tortuosities, the dislocations we have inflicted upon ourselves in order
to depart from simple common sense; and at our own expense we learn
that one does not deform himself with impunity. Novelty, after all, is
ephemeral. Nothing endures but the eternal commonplace; and if one
departs from that, it is to run the most perilous risks. Happy he who is
able to reclaim himself, who finds the way back to simplicity.
Good plain sense is not, as is often imagined, the innate possession of
the first chance-comer, a mean and paltry equipment that has cost
nothing to anyone. I would compare it to those old folk-songs,
unfathered but deathless, which seem to have risen out of the very heart
of the people. Good sense is a fund slowly and painfully accumulated
by the labor of centuries. It is a jewel of the first water, whose value he
alone understands who has lost it, or who observes the lives of others
who have lost it. For my part, I think no price too great to pay for
gaining it and keeping it, for the possession of eyes that see and a
judgment that discerns. One takes good care of his sword, that it be not
bent or rusted: with greater reason should he give heed to his thought.
But let this be well understood: an appeal to common sense is not an
appeal to thought that grovels, to narrow positivism which denies

everything it cannot see or touch. For to wish that man should be
absorbed in material sensations, to the exclusion of the high realities of
the inner life, is also a want of good sense. Here we touch upon a tender
point, round which the greatest battles of humanity are waging. In truth
we are striving to attain a conception of life, searching it out amid
countless obscurities and griefs: and everything that touches upon
spiritual realities becomes day by day more painful. In the midst of the
grave perplexities and transient disorders that accompany great crises
of thought, it seems more difficult than ever to escape with any simple
principles. Yet necessity itself comes to our aid, as it has done for the
men of all times. The program of life is terribly simple, after all, and in
the fact that existence so imperiously forces herself upon us, she gives
us notice that she precedes any idea of her which we may make for
ourselves, and that no one can put off living pending an attempt to
understand life. Our philosophies, our explanations, our beliefs are
everywhere confronted by facts, and these facts, prodigious, irrefutable,
call us to order when we would deduce life from our reasonings, and
would wait to act until we have ended philosophizing. It is this happy
necessity that prevents the world from stopping while man questions
his route. Travelers of a day, we are carried along in a vast movement
to which we are called upon to contribute, but which we have not
foreseen, nor embraced in its entirety, nor penetrated as to its ultimate
aims. Our part is to fill faithfully the rôle of private, which has
devolved upon us, and our thought should adapt itself to the situation.
Do not say that we live in more trying times than our ancestors, for
things seen from afar are often seen imperfectly: it is moreover scarcely
gracious to complain of not having been born in the days of one's
grandfather. What we may believe least contestable on the subject is
this: from the beginning of the world