How to Face Life

Part 1

How to Face Life

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THE ART OF LIFE SERIES Edward Howard Griggs, Editor

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How to Face Life

STEPHEN S. WISE Rabbi of the Free Synagogue, New York

NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXVII

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COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY B. W. HUEBSCH

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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TO MY LOUTINJIM

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CONTENTS

I YOUTH

PREPARING FOR LIFE

PAGE 9

II MATURITY

HOW TO SERVE AND ACHIEVE

PAGE 48

III AGE

HOW NOT TO GROW OLD

PAGE 62

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YOUTH: PREPARING FOR LIFE

“How beautiful is youth! How bright it gleams. With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend! Aladdin’s Lamp, and Fortunatus’ Purse! That holds the treasures of the universe! All possibilities are in its hands, No danger daunts it and no foe withstands; In its sublime audacity of faith, ‘Be thou removed,’ it to the mountain saith, And with ambitious feet, secure and proud, Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud.”

—LONGFELLOW: Morituri Salutamus.

How to face life, how to prepare for life, are questions that must be answered by those who believe, as Lecky put it, that the “map of life” must be marked out, that in the words of Emerson there is such a thing as the “conduct of life” which man is free to determine.

Part 2

We are assured incessantly in these days that we must enter upon a great programme of preparedness for war,—back of which urging lies the assumption that a maximum of preparedness must be arranged in order to secure our land against the menace of aggression or invasion. If a programme of preparedness, which in the last analysis involves destruction and desolation, be impossible without the fullest planning, how much less possible is it to shape a constructive life-upbuilding programme without most careful and adequate preparedness.

Into the mind of youth must penetrate the ideal of self-preparedness,—not of external preparation for the outward life, but of inmost preparedness for the inner life. Whether or not the preparedness programme be, as some hold, more menacing to the soul of America than foreign foe can ever become because it marks an immediate invasion of the American soul rather than a possible aggression upon American soil, it is certain that life cannot worthily be lived save after preparedness in the fullest sense of the term.

It is, in truth, easy to stir up excitement and even deeper feeling over a purely external problem such as is that of war-preparedness, preparing to do something to another whether an individual or a nation or a continent. The easiest way is the way of external preparedness, the militaristic way, for it involves a minimum of reasoning. But preparation for life which I ask of youth involves the largest measure of reasoning and planning and purposing. It is the hardest way rather than the easiest way, though the pursuit thereof makes ultimately for the way that is inevitably rightful and unerring.

Is it needful to urge upon young people that they shall face life with the determination to sketch for themselves a map of life as they see it, as they purpose, if so be they purpose, to make it? What would be said of a military commander who entered upon a land to him unknown without securing in advance the fullest possible data, without gaining, as far as it was possible so to do, an understanding of the outlines of the country he proposed to enter?

Curiously enough, it is often imagined that preparation for life is largely a matter of the higher education and exclusively associated with college and university life. This imagining may be due to the circumstance that men and women step out of so-called preparatory schools into higher institutions of learning. One sometimes wonders, in very truth, whether, instead of college preparing men for life, it were not more fitting to hold that after the college or university experience men need to be repaired if they are rightly to live and toil and serve.

My counsel is not for men alone but for men and women, for youth and maidens alike. Let no man venture to offer two kinds of counsel, one to men and yet another to women. There is only one manner of preparedness for life, for life is life and it is not one thing for a man and yet another for a woman.

Though I have used the term “map of life,” map is hardly a happy analogy. For maps presuppose that a land is become known and familiar. And life cannot be foreknown and charted, if life it is to be, as every life ought to be, a great adventure into the unknown rather than the acceptance of a programme, a hazard of the spirit rather than a body of prescriptions and ordinances. We are to fare forth upon the seas of life,—without chart. But some of us attempt to sail the sea rudderless, helmless, starless. Men and women embark upon life without ever having given thought to the storms that beset, to the rocks that threaten, to the unknown perils that may lie before. And then it is wondered why many fail to make port, why the ships of life frequently founder upon the high seas. The wonder ought rather to be that so many enter triumphantly into the harbors of eternity, seeing how rarely men map out life in advance, seeing how grudging is the time spent upon preparation, seeing how seldom men diligently and consciously prepare to meet those difficulties and burdens and problems which adequate preparedness for life alone can fit the soul to face.

Let not life be mapped out so definitely for you, so accurately and systematically that no room will be left for the play of your own will and the determinations of your own spirit. I would almost rather have every map of life flung away than have life so mapped out as to leave youth no freedom of choice, as to fail to spur men on to face the great adventure, to be capable of daring to front whatsoever life may offer. Not very long ago, I inquired of friends, whose little lad is a pupil of one of the so-called best schools in the land, when they had applied for his admittance, and they answered, “Before he was born.” It occurred to me to inquire what dire thing would have happened in the event of the lad having proved upon birth to be a little lass, but the comforting assurance was at once given me that such contingency, not to say calamity, had been guarded against, in a sense, through applying for admittance to a girls’ school in the event of the lad being born a lass. It seemed to me then as it does now an admirable thing to make such comprehensive provision for a child’s education as to gain for it in advance of birth admittance into two schools, irrespective of sex.

But, without resting too heavily upon this illustration, is it not possible to prepare another for life so definitely as to deny to youth the privilege of willing, choosing, venturing, daring—even losing? It were almost better that a youth go without the problematic advantages of school discipline than have his school and college and university career chosen and marked out for him rigidly and inflexibly. What greater wrong can I do my child than to withhold from him the freedom of choice, than so to cabin and confine his spirit that he must needs beat his wings in the intense inane without knowing the atmosphere that magnifies freedom and liberates the soul? Guide if you will the life of youth, but beware of the danger of maiming and crippling life through so definitely and completely mapping it out as to deny the soul of youth the peril of adventure, the joy of combat, the glory of hopeless daring.

Life must mean pioneering, not making one’s way, but breaking a way, clearing a path of life for one’s self. It is the glory of life,—and there is no glory like unto it,—to face the task of moral and intellectual pioneering. There is danger lest in our time there pass out of the life of men one of the most precious of things, that pioneering spirit that comes to the man who after he has fared forth, braved every danger, stood every peril at bay, declares in the word of the poet:

“Anybody might have heard it But God’s whisper came to me.”

The whisper of God comes to every man or to every man it may come. The opportunity for the performance of the task of moral or spiritual pioneering is denied to no man. Americas of the spirit remain to be discovered within the life of every one of us. What man or woman who may read this will affirm that there has never come into his life a revelation the gleam of which enables him to see that he is free to reach a great decision, that his spirit may dare a great refusal, that his soul may utter a great affirmation? The great moment of life is that in which a man is revealed unto himself, in which his soul is laid bare, in which it comes to him with the force of a revelation,—mine is the power to will and to determine the content of my life, though if I am to will I must dare to be myself, I must reach the decision, I must will, I must be free.

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