Simple Martin was not irritated, or perplexed, or rendered helplessly inarticulate by this question, as the rest of us had always been.  He looked around him at the lovely, sloping lines of Hemlock Mountain, at the Necronett River singing in the sunlight, at the familiar, friendly faces of the people in the street, and he answered in astonishment at the ignorance of his questioners, “Do?  Why, we jes’ live!”

We felt that he had explained us once and for all.  We had known that, of course, but we hadn’t before, in our own phrase, “sensed it.”  We just live.  And sometimes it seems to us that we are the only people in America engaged in that most wonderful occupation.  We know, of course, that we must be wrong in thinking this, and that there must be countless other Hillsboros scattered everywhere, rejoicing as we do in an existence which does not necessarily make us care-free or happy, which does not in the least absolve us from the necessity of working hard (for Hillsboro is unbelievably poor in money), but which does keep us alive in every fiber of our sympathy and thrilling with the consciousness of the life of others.

A common and picturesque expression for a common experience runs, “It’s so noisy I can’t hear myself think.”  After a visit to New York we feel that its inhabitants are so deafened by the constant blare of confusion that they can’t feel themselves live.  The steady sufferers from this complaint do not realize their condition.  They find it on the whole less trouble not to feel themselves live, and they are most uneasy when chance forces them to spend a few days (on shipboard, for instance) where they are not protected by ceaseless and aimless activity from the consciousness that they are themselves.  They cannot even conceive the bitter-sweet, vital taste of that consciousness as we villagers have it, and they cannot understand how arid their existence seems to us without this unhurried, penetrating realization of their own existence and of the meaning of their acts.  We do not blame city dwellers for not having it; we ourselves lose it when we venture into their maelstrom.  Like them, we become dwarfed by overwhelming numbers, and shriveled by the incapacity to “sense” the humanity of the countless human simulacra about us.  But we do not stay where we cannot feel ourselves live.  We hurry back to the shadow of Hemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be what Is usually called happy, one needs only to live.

It cannot be, of course, that we are the only community to discover this patent fact; but we know no more of the others than they of us.  All that we hear from that part of America which is not Hillsboro is the wild yell of excitement going up from the great cities, where people seem to be doing everything that was ever done or thought of except just living.  City dwellers make money, make reputations (good and bad), make museums and subways, make charitable institutions, make with a hysteric rapidity, like excited spiders, more and yet more complications in the mazy labyrinths of their lives, but they never make each others’ acquaintances ... and that is all that is worth doing in the world.