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Concerning Plans, Etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (July 24, 1909) : 29
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      It is to be hoped that in some way our unfulfilled plans are made up to us. Not by allowing us to do other things of equal charm, for this would be no sort of a restitution, but by arranging a second incarnation with the same tastes and preferences. Perhaps even this would not soothe the excessively sore spot left by an abandoned plan. Perhaps nothing can make us feel the same again. Perhaps, seeing that this is the case, the world had better readjust itself when it sees that we have made up our minds and avoid dire results by not getting in our way. People speak so lightly of the changed plans of other people, and if they do not speak with heat of their own shattered intentions it is no doubt because they cannot trust themselves to speak of the matter at all. If for a matter of six months you have promised yourself the Cathedral at Chartres, and promised it at a certain time, then when the time comes and something is substituted in place of Chartres, your enthusiasms are justified in feeling that they have been tricked, deceived, made light of, and their never quite trusting you again is only to be expected.
      The moment a plan is formulated — is it necessary to say that none but rightly running people are under discussion — a thousand little alarms and rockets are set, each moment that passes between the time when the plan was thought of and the ecstatic second when it should come off tightens the springs of these little mechanisms, so that when their moment arrives, and they are not allowed to go off with their relieving whizzes and whirs, it is not an overstatement to say that one suffers. Some people are filled with these frustrated exclamation points and they must be uncommonly uncomfortable inside. Of course if at the faintest outline of a plan one’s imagination does not leap into action, but, merely raising its head, remarks that the idea will be well enough if it ever comes to anything, if this is one’s sluggish habit, one, no doubt, leads a life of comparative comfort. But it is not the way of the majority (this is insisted upon, though with some doubts stirring in the mind of the writer); a plan is a match that sets the most sodden of us aflame. If Ravenna seemed possible to us, we sent a facet ahead and it awaited us there patiently, acquiring, only because we had said that it would be safe to do so, a feeling of permanency in Ravenna, taking on a settled air with which to meet us when we finally arrived. The remedy — is it is to be hoped that not for a single instance did any one think to the contrary — always to follow a plan once it is formulated. Explain to all obstacles how serious, not to say dangerous, the changing of a plan is. Let them know that what seems to them only a plan might, if baffled, mean partial dissolution for you. Just because a plan is in the future does not excuse the world for regarding it as a thing easily disposed of. Then — and here enters the treachery — we never went to Ravenna; after months of leading on with false expectations the enthusiasms kept with us as well as the facets we sent ahead, Ravenna was cut out of our route and what in such a situation can we expect? Nothing better than to lose the facet, a catastrophe that makes us forever a damaged, incomplete article, and to be conscious whenever Ravenna is mentioned of an aching, unsatisfied void. It will be seen at once that such risks are not to be run with a careless frequency. It would be no pretty predicament to have facets scattered all over the place, making one present at home the appearance of a tattered honeycomb. The remedy — is it is to be hoped that not for a single instance did any one think to the contrary — always to follow a plan once it is formulated. Explain to all obstacles how serious, not to say dangerous, the changing of a plan is. Let them know that what seems to them only a plan might, if baffled, mean partial dissolution for you. Just because a plan is in the future does not excuse the world for regarding it as a thing easily disposed of.A plan, if it is any sort of a plan at all, is to its maker a stern, irrevocable fact, and destroying facts is an extremely grave matter. It is just this side of the affair that needs all the air discussion can give it. Plans are as an institution perfect and need no support, but the attitude of the world toward plans in general, and particularly toward plans not of their composing — Ah, it would be very nearly impossible to say too much.
      One of the things said, one of the unbearable things, is that if you do not carry out a plan now you will some other time. But such a remark proves one guilty of absolute ignorance of the first rules of planning. To carry out one’s abandoned plan for this minute some three months ahead is not carrying out the plan at all. It is a splendidly courageous making of a second plan, while the first plan lies shattered — a contenting of oneself with an imitation, a brave satisfaction felt in a clock run down and no longer capable of a single expectant tick. It is such feats as these that go unapplauded, while the easy braveries bring constant clatter about our ears. Dead plans lying in one’s heart make much heavier burdens than the most undigested of entrées in the place where undigested entrées stop, yet it is these of which one converses and meets kindred souls over.
      Hold boats, write to the papers, ask help of the philanthropists, make trains amenable, annihilate time, railway officials, and circumstances, but bow before plans, make way before them If any instinct for neatness has been given one it is more than distressing to have intentions in half the cities of the continent, which if visited would unite one with one’s wishes, and the result would be an eternally comforting sense of completion. However, this is a detail of a very large subject, and the real business in hand is to make a plea for better treatment, beginning now, of all and every one’s plans. There being no reparation for a thwarted plan, and surely that has been made clear, it is beautifully obvious that anything must be done rather than deal a wound that will remain forever open. Hold boats, write to the papers, ask help of the philanthropists, make trains amenable, annihilate time, railway officials, and circumstances, but bow before plans, make way before them, treat them as the adored, cherished, unlikely, persecuted things they are. Do anything upsetting except be so spiritless as not to make them. That should be a point of honor with us all.

      When will localities learn to face their weather bravely and cease this silly evading of days that on the face of them can not all be “unusual”? Unusual weather is the most palpable of pretences, yet no one hesitates to stand up for their native climate at the expense of their veracity and declare the present weather a thing that has never happened before. Gently it is intimated that the newcomer is responsible for this change for the worse. As it is an entirely new thing and first noticed by an out-of-town person — well, they courteously but firmly shift the responsibility off their own shoulders to the place where they think it belongs. Now it stands to reason that all weather in all places cannot be out of the usual order of things. It requires reticence and a long concealment of one’s worst manners to be honestly unusual. Weather has never been reticent. The more likely thing is that, as no one has ever become completely reconciled to weather, it has an eternally novel air. It is improbable that any one has ever been able to believe that weather is as bad as it is. It is so wholly trying or so intoxicatingly lovely that our relations with it have all the stiff excitement one experiences on making a new acquaintance. Then, as weather from the first showed every trick in its bag, ran the gamut of its possibilities, it was out of the question that even the eighth day should be treated to unusual weather. It requires reticence and a long concealment of one’s worst manners to be honestly unusual. Weather has never been reticent. It is surly, coquettish, vicious, capricious, dogged, devilish — there is no need of hunting for adjectives, it is all of them except unusual. That alone we balk at and refuse to admit.
 

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