Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Awe of the abstract
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (February 8, 1913) : 21
link (hathitrust) / link (University of Michigan scan at google)
The average mind has a doglike attitude toward the abstract. We like it as a faithful animal likes a great and titled person, not understanding why he is great, even ignoring the greatness through inability to take it in, but meekly friendly and very pleased for no producible reason to be near. The crowd that files into lectures on astronomy or other performances of an equal scientific aloofness is a nice, likable crowd, the members of which have curious excuses for being present. A very small group is at home with the subject, a slightly larger group is taking it in the grind of a student course, a handful attend unwillingly at the heels of insistent relatives. A very few go from sheer pose; their personal life not rendering tribute of exciting emotion at the moment, they are being literary in the hope that it may reflect some of its honor on them. But these added up into one group still constitute but a minority. Every one else is in a category in which every human has found himself at one time included. It is a category which requires a garrulous definition and some insistence as we would each contradict the terms on instinct.
We do not expect to understand profound subjects; we do not even strain at listening. What we like and in reality go for is the privilege of sitting openmouthed and muted while vastness floats on the air. We like the feel of it just as the dog likes to be scratched behind the ear by his noble master. We are affected with the same delightful drowsiness. We are soothed by the reminder that great things exist and are being dealt with. It resuscitates the belief which we have some trouble in maintaining, that the human race is a victorious force perpetually adding to its victories. It is just such things as popular lectures on erudite subjects, eyeing the backs of encyclopedias, and holding pamphlets explaining Kepler’s laws that give us a sustaining reassurance of order existing, clearly incomprehensible, yet existing, and as a final happy solace hobnobbed with by a few.
This, we feel, is precisely as it should be. Our lives are apt to whirl us about in a world made up of dissatisfying and futile spurts after nothing, so that our feeling of betrayed trust and cheer turns into a suspicion that silly, dreary bewilderment may constitute life. This makes our relief in the law-abiding sun, moon, and stars, plus the man who discovered their ways and retained his sanity while doing it — a very natural and rather touching thing. We resemble the thousands who go and shake hands with the President. They wonder at times if there can be a government in our land, and their relief at reaching it by so homely a means as shuffling and then finding it smiling broadly during an interval in its gaily sustained existence is real and simple-hearted.
We take our celebrities in a little the same way and like a book the more for having clasped dumbly and even awkwardly the hand that wrote it. The fact that we are so far below the pinnacles is what constitutes our need of being assured of their existence. We are so little proof in ourselves of the inspiring grandeur of things that it would be a sorry business if we could have no other. We sit in empty cathedrals, knowing nothing of beauty and little of religion, and we would be shyly pained if asked to explain our act, yet the time in the cathedral reassured us. Untrained women read psychology and know they are getting an eightieth part of the meaning and that uncertainly, yet they have been in contact with a trained mind and have seen it to be of the same material as their own, and they retain hope.
We do not mind feeling humble or ignorant or knowing that we have far to go; it is precisely what we sometimes drolly bear evidence to liking, and what in our hearts we yearn to have overpowering reason for doing.
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Life at first hand is undoubtedly the interesting and educational way to have it, but it has the disadvantage of seeming very much like bothersome predicaments, while life at second hand, found in books and at the theater, is at that perfect distance which permits us to recognize its extreme lifelikeness. The people who live fastidiously and neatly, who like even their great causes and passions to have a seemly outline, telling where they begin and end, prefer life at second hand. They choose friends who will admire books with them rather than embroil themselves in the cantankerousness of a real friendship. They marry people who will thrust very little first-hand life upon them and leave them a great deal of blankness to be filled up with pleasantly tidy theorizing.
If one does not like to be physically hot, dishevelled, and brawling, one enjoys even less a like emotional state. Our tempered excitements over fiction must seem very funny to people whose eyes are clouded with the heat haze of immediate experience. After a bout with real life, which we never remember to be real life until afterward, we feel jarred and mussed, as though we had slipped on a banana peel in public. We wish it had not happened, and try to imply by our manner that it did not happen, and that those who saw it were mistaken. Hardly any one intends to live at first hand; above all, not we neatly emotioned moderns. It comes upon us from behind, and the first thing we know is a poignant need for tidying up. We feel outraged at having been caught up by a whirlwind of something vulgarly loud and uncontrolled. Abandonment strikes us as somewhat sordid.
We are so little at home with strong emotion that we never think of meeting it; we only collide with it, and there is all the picking up afterward that naturally follows a collision. Second-hand emotions are sometimes things to look back upon with pride; they are by way of being artistic achievements; but firsthand emotions are never precisely what we would have had them, and so at our first opportunity we deny that they ever took place. Such scurvy treatment of emotions should prohibit our ever having the chance of a second go at them.
24 July 2026