The Goldfish

'Goldfish', The

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Title: The "Goldfish"
Author: Arthur Train
Release Date: July 16, 2004 [eBook #12920]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE "GOLDFISH"
Being the Confessions af a Successful Man
EDITED BY

ARTHUR TRAIN
1921

[Illustration: Arthur Train from the drawing by S.J. Woolf]

"They're like 'goldfish' swimming round and round in a big bowl. They
can look through, sort of dimly; but they can't get out?"--Hastings, p.
315.

CONTENTS

MYSELF
MY FRIENDS
MY CHILDREN
MY MIND
MY MORALS
MY FUTURE
"We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who
elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have
lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of
poverty could have meant--the liberation from material attachments;
the unbribed soul; the manlier indifference; the paying our way by what
we are or do, and not by what we have; the right to fling away our life
at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in short the moral
fighting shape.... It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among
the educated class is the worst moral disease from which our

civilization suffers."
William James, p. 313.
CHAPTER I
MYSELF
"My house, my affairs, my ache and my religion--"
I was fifty years old to-day. Half a century has hurried by since I first
lay in my mother's wondering arms. To be sure, I am not old; but I can
no longer deceive myself into believing that I am still young. After all,
the illusion of youth is a mental habit consciously encouraged to defy
and face down the reality of age. If, at twenty, one feels that he has
reached man's estate he, nevertheless, tests his strength and abilities, his
early successes or failures, by the temporary and fictitious standards of
youth.
At thirty a professional man is younger than the business man of
twenty-five. Less is expected of him; his work is less responsible; he
has not been so long on his job. At forty the doctor or lawyer may still
achieve an unexpected success. He has hardly won his spurs, though in
his heart he well knows his own limitations. He can still say: "I am
young yet!" And he is.
But at fifty! Ah, then he must face the facts! He either has or has not
lived up to his expectations and he never can begin over again. A
creature of physical and mental habit, he must for the rest of his life
trudge along in the same path, eating the same food, thinking the same
thoughts, seeking the same pleasures--until he acknowledges with grim
reluctance that he is an old man.
I confess that I had so far deliberately tried to forget my approaching
fiftieth milestone, or at least to dodge it with closed eyes as I passed it
by, that my daughter's polite congratulation on my demicentennial
anniversary gave me an unexpected and most unpleasant shock.

"You really ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she remarked as she
joined me at breakfast.
"Why?" I asked, somewhat resenting being thus definitely proclaimed
as having crossed into the valley of the shadows.
"To be so old and yet to look so young!" she answered, with charming
_voir-faire_.
Then I knew the reason of my resentment against fate. It was because I
was labeled as old while, in fact, I was still young. Of course that was it.
Old? Ridiculous! When my daughter was gone I gazed searchingly at
myself in the mirror. Old? Nonsense!
I saw a man with no wrinkles and only a few crow's-feet such as
anybody might have had; with hardly a gray hair on my temples and
with not even a suggestion of a bald spot. My complexion and color
were good and denoted vigorous health; my flesh was firm and hard on
my cheeks; my teeth were sound, even and white; and my eyes were
clear save for a slight cloudiness round the iris.
The only physical defect to which I was frankly willing to plead guilty
was a flabbiness of the neck under the chin, which might by a hostile
eye have been regarded as slightly double. For the rest I was strong and
fairly well--not much inclined to exercise, to be sure, but able, if
occasion offered, to wield a tennis racket