Adventures in Friendship | Page 9

together and persuade them that the
things they think serious are not serious at all.

III
THE OPEN ROAD
"To make space for wandering is it that the world was made so wide."
--GOETHE, Wilhelm Meister.
I love sometimes to have a day alone--a riotous day. Sometimes I do
not care to see even my best friends: but I give myself up to the full

enjoyment of the world around me. I go out of my door in the
morning--preferably a sunny morning, though any morning will do well
enough--and walk straight out into the world. I take with me the burden
of no duty or responsibility. I draw in the fresh air, odour-laden from
orchard and wood. I look about me as if everything were new--and
behold everything is new. My barn, my oaks, my fences--I declare I
never saw them before. I have no preconceived impressions, or beliefs,
or opinions. My lane fence is the end of the known earth. I am a
discoverer of new fields among old ones. I see, feel, hear, smell, taste
all these wonderful things for the first time. I have no idea what
discoveries I shall make!
So I go down the lane, looking up and about me. I cross the town road
and climb the fence on the other side. I brush one shoulder among the
bushes as I pass: I feel the solid yet easy pressure of the sod. The long
blades of the timothy-grass clasp at my legs and let go with reluctance.
I break off a twig here and there and taste the tart or bitter sap. I take
off my hat and let the warm sun shine on my head. I am an adventurer
upon a new earth.
Is it not marvellous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in
pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home? We mistake
unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle
foreignness. For want of that ardent inner curiosity which is the only
true foundation for the appreciation of beauty--for beauty is inward, not
outward--we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere
curious resemblances which, like unassimilated property, possess no
power of fecundation. With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks
and passes in Switzerland; how we come laden from England with vain
cathedrals!
Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach? For wilderness, for
foreignness, I have no need to go a mile: I have only to come up
through my thicket or cross my field from my own roadside--and
behold, a new heaven and a new earth!
Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we
cease to see them. Whole vibrant significant worlds around us

disappear within the sombre mists of familiarity. Whichever way we
look the roads are dull and barren. There is a tree at our gate we have
not seen in years: a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful
than the shining heights of the Alps!
It has seemed to me sometimes as though I could see men hardening
before my eyes, drawing in a feeler here, walling up an opening there.
Naming things! Objects fall into categories for them and wear little
sure channels in the brain. A mountain is a mountain, a tree a tree to
them, a field forever a field. Life solidifies itself in words. And finally
how everything wearies them and that is old age!
Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see and
feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend the
eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of yesterday
before the surer observations of to-day?--is not that the best life we
know?
And so to the Open Road! Not many miles from my farm there is a
tamarack swamp. The soft dark green of it fills the round bowl of a
valley. Around it spread rising forests and fields; fences divide it from
the known land. Coming across my fields one day, I saw it there. I felt
the habit of avoidance. It is a custom, well enough in a practical land,
to shun such a spot of perplexity; but on that day I was following the
Open Road, and it led me straight to the moist dark stillness of the
tamaracks. I cannot here tell all the marvels I found in that place. I trod
where human foot had never trod before. Cobwebs barred my passage
(the bars to most passages when we came to them are only cobwebs),
the earth was soft with the thick swamp mosses, and with many an
autumn of fallen dead, brown leaves. I crossed the track of a muskrat, I
saw the