I

“The burden of the valley of vision”

I came here eight years ago as the renter of this farm, of which soon afterward I became the owner.  The time before that I like to forget.  The chief impression it left, upon my memory, now happily growing indistinct, is of being hurried faster than I could well travel.  From the moment, as a boy of seventeen, I first began to pay my own way, my days were ordered by an inscrutable power which drove me hourly to my task.  I was rarely allowed to look up or down, but always forward, toward that vague Success which we Americans love to glorify.

My senses, my nerves, even my muscles were continually strained to the utmost of attainment.  If I loitered or paused by the wayside, as it seems natural for me to do, I soon heard the sharp crack of the lash.  For many years, and I can say it truthfully, I never rested.  I neither thought nor reflected.  I had no pleasure, even though I pursued it fiercely during the brief respite of vacations.  Through many feverish years I did not work:  I merely produced.

The only real thing I did was to hurry as though every moment were my last, as though the world, which now seems so rich in everything, held only one prize which might be seized upon before I arrived.  Since then I have tried to recall, like one who struggles to restore the visions of a fever, what it was that I ran to attain, or why I should have borne without rebellion such indignities to soul and body.  That life seems now, of all illusions, the most distant and unreal.  It is like the unguessed eternity before we are born:  not of concern compared with that eternity upon which we are now embarked.

All these things happened in cities and among crowds.  I like to forget them.  They smack of that slavery of the spirit which is so much worse than any mere slavery of the body.

One day—­it was in April, I remember, and the soft maples in the city park were just beginning to blossom—­I stopped suddenly.  I did not intend to stop.  I confess in humiliation that it was no courage, no will of my own.  I intended to go on toward Success:  but Fate stopped me.  It was as if I had been thrown violently from a moving planet:  all the universe streamed around me and past me.  It seemed to me that of all animate creation, I was the only thing that was still or silent.  Until I stopped I had not known the pace I ran; and I had a vague sympathy and understanding, never felt before, for those who left the running.  I lay prostrate with fever and close to death for weeks and watched the world go by:  the dust, the noise, the very colour of haste.  The only sharp pang that I suffered was the feeling that I should be broken-hearted and that I was not; that I should care and that I did not.  It was as though I had died and escaped all further responsibility.  I even watched with dim equanimity my friends racing past me, panting as they ran.  Some of them paused