Born Out of Time

BY a thousand indubitable signs I realize that the time has come for me to grumble. The world does not altogether suit me, and I begin to say, with a dubious shaking of the head, that it was not so when I was young. Now and then, to be sure, it crosses my mind that in those far-off days things were not altogether to my liking; but this occasional twinge of memory I conceal from the young of to-day. Possibly the spring hats help me to realize how many are the present ways of life which I cannot understand. Certainly they are so fashioned as to strike home to any rational mind a sense of change, and I often rub my eyes, wondering if it is real, this world of the grotesque in straw, and of equally choice novelties in thought and in habit. Wide-eyed, I marvel at my juniors, at their language, their ways of thinking, their attitude toward their elders, their taste in the matter of doing their hair, and in literature, both of which seem a bit sensational.

I was born out of time! Lover of time-honored ways, inheritor of homespun tastes in a world of shining, flimsy silk and sham velvet, — what place is there for me in the modern life? The world has grown smart, and I am unable to achieve even an admiration for smartness, for I like quiet corners, and the sound of old-fashioned ideas discussed at length therein. The duties of eld press upon me, and I feel that upon my shoulders is laid the burden, not of prophecy, but of loud lamentation over the passing of the past. The whole emphasis on things seems to have changed from inner to outer values, from faith in the indubitable realities of the unseen, to a belief in that which can be merely seen and touched.

As I write this, a certain feeling of self-satisfaction enwraps me, and I revel in a fine oncoming sense of the alltoo-great-wisdom of age. It is no small satisfaction to feel that so many of my contemporaries are blinded by the shows of things, which my more penetrating glance pierces; but this joy is shortlived, for, thinking more deeply, I find in myself a limitation and a lack. With apprehension I realize how far I lag behind the race, and I begin to wonder if I do not belong to an already extinct species, like the trilobite, which probably had no use for fresh ideas. I dislike new inventions. Why did they devise the telephone? Communication between individuals of the human race was much too free-and-easy before. What chance has a man now to think? to develop? to learn to know himself and to be himself? What privacy is there? Whither may he retreat? He goes, perchance, into the innermost sanctuary of his being; the world is upon him in a motor-car. He retires to the holy of holies of himself; the telephone bell jangles; wireless messages pursue him to the uttermost parts of the sea. The telegraph boy, the uniformed messenger, lurk by the portal of the human soul, waiting for it to come out so that they may pounce upon it.

My state of mind is foolish; I dare say my grandfather felt just this way about steam-cars and the doctrine of evolution, but I cannot help it. I resent new truths and new theories. It is no comfort to me that the leg of one animal will grow upon another, and, if one tenth of the stories of lingering agony be true, it is small comfort to either animal.

So I jog along in the old way, picking out the old footprints, living in a house with no telephone, and no approach for motor-cars. Imagine the lot of poor Job if his three friends had been able to arrive with present-day swiftness! Imagine how many more would have come if transit had been as rapid and as easy as in these days!

It is certainly most uncomfortable, this tendency of the human race to progress; I should like the world better if things stayed put . I had grown used to it, almost reconciled to it, and here it goes speeding like the wind away from me over leagues of roadway; fluttering into the air over my head, obscuring the infinite blue; and discovering in earth magic new elements that disturb the number of those I was taught years ago at a thoroughly good school. Perhaps each one of us in his own way lags behind his generation, and the habit is probably an old one. Doubtless the ichthyosaurus resented the way in which the dinosaur gained upon him, and I have no doubt that the Neanderthaler man, who with difficulty walked upright,—when you come to think of it we have not got much beyond that now, — made it extremely uncomfortable for whatever human thing it was that went before him on four legs.

Now that I remember, in the days of my youth my elders used to feel precisely as I do now about the manners and the ideas of the young. Can it be that anything was really wrong then? The one unchanging thing in this world of change is the way of the grandparent in discovering the limitations of the grandchild, and yet, in spite of all misgivings, the youngsters seem to make some progress for the race as they trudge on into middle age. It is just conceivable that there is growth down under the fantastic appearances of to-day; outward signs do not always fully reveal the shaping powers within.

I fancy that it has been thus with every organism in the long chain of being since the first amœba started shrinkingly on its fluid way. A bit belated and a bit in advance, a bit ahead, a bit behind one’s generation, — so we go stumbling on in the old fashion of any living creature seeking adjustment. Ah, if one could only find the secret plan in the seemingly illogical, irrational fashion in which life goes jogging on, dumb to the demand of the young that justice shall appear in all its workings, as to the prayer of the old that reason shall prevail; capable of working out splendid achievements by its droll methods of advance, retreat, concession, — going all ways at once. The shambling step of Mother Nature, after all, leads to glorious goals. Does each man feel a bit out of place in his generation? How, otherwise, could the ceaseless process go on? Endless becoming seems to be the principle on which this queer old universe is made; did anybody, or any living thing, ever exist which was not ‘born out of time’?