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.
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