ONE: BOOM YEAR SKETCHES (continued 2)

Now follow other results. Swift movement, increasing the extension of our sight, enfeebles the intensity and quality of what we see. With the delusion of seeing more, we see less: with the delusion of unfolding more miles of the world, the span of living shrinks. The drug is foe to meditation, to solitude, to careful and loving observance. It frees the addict from resorting to himself in the crises of dullness: he need not explore the devious trails of his soul, when so many, wider, asphalted roads are beyond him. But meditation and leisurely observance are the traits whereby life becomes real.

In lieu of them, we have the bare experience of passing. Moments are not dwelt in; they are overcome. The “present” of life, no longer a treasure to be mined, is a barrier to be vaulted. But moments and places are real to us only in so far as we put ourselves within them. Now with this drug the converse happens: we take ourselves away from moments and from places. Moments and places grow void. Life becomes a succession of zeros.

Within each soul there is a kindred process. The drug 53is a substitute for thought and for emotion. So hallucinatory is its sensuous effect of “progress” that the addict literally moves out of his troubles. Are troubles not matter for thinking and for feeling? And do not thought and feeling require some rest—or at least some constant, unconscious motion—in order to be enjoyed? This drug of ours, spelling flight, flight from the hour and the place upon us, brings flight as well from the problems of life that fill the place and the hour.... Remains only motion ... only the emotion of motion.

The drug’s use is a short cut: and nothing is more dangerous and sterile. A short cut through time, through place, through life—leads to death! Life is swift, and the value of life is the value of every moment. A machine, an act, a drug which makes us leap this moment is murderous. Alas! here, too, there has been confusion between the effects of a narcotic and what we consider our ideals. For we are proud of the short cuts with which we clutter and sterilize our world. Newspapers, telephones, radios, are imperious short cuts, demanding that we devote an ever-increased portion of our days to details and surfaces of men and matters we might well ignore. The use of this drug eliminates the ground between the “beginning” and the “end.” But both “beginning” and “end” of anything are abstractions, darkness, death. The between is life. So the use of the drug lessens life.

It has another, curious effect upon the user: a subtle one, hard to grasp—but not without importance. It lifts the user from the embrace of living things, setting him, half insulate, in a machine. To walk the earth, to sail the sea, to ride a horse or plod behind one in a buggy—to drink the heady brews of grain or vine—these are all ways of touching life. But to box oneself into a thing of iron, and race through the verdurous world as fast as ever one may, is to get almost out of life, even without the common aid of accidents. It is 54to exile oneself from the sensuous growing earth which is our ultimate food.

Now, to move is to overcome resistance. And to overcome resistance too well is to avoid life’s loveliness which dawns on men only when they are forced to pause. The perfect, unconscious mechanism of an animal knows neither thought nor beauty. The child begins to think and to enjoy, only when life stops him. This drug of ours induces a child’s heaven—or an animal’s. It makes things too easy: seeing the world, seeing folks, seeing your girl, too easy. And man can stand the adversity which bores him, far better than a lubricated ease. To see an endless series of places is to value none of them. To see too many folks is to see too little of oneself. For the value of things lies, in great extent, in the amount of ourselves we must put forth to get them. Take love-making, for example. Resistance and time are so necessary for its right consummation that even the brutes know it. Make the tryst between the boy and the girl too facile and too swift—eliminate the hazards of invading little brothers in family drawing rooms—and the couple will very soon prefer the delights of a hard-won brown bottle to the delights of each other.

So the vicious circle rounds. And the drug whose use was to bring increased power and joy turns its addict impotent and sad. This specific concoction has done much to make of us a gloomy people. Or, perhaps, it was the other way. Being a lugubrious lot, we have fallen victims to a drug which turns us even worse: making us roll along on lines of motion far less fancifully pleasant than the devious ones induced by alcohol.

Unfortunately the drug’s ill results have not yet made us sick of it. We are merely demanding more of the same. Swifter mobility to kill time and trouble; more elaborate and expensive emptinesses to fill empty holidays. In the 55American town, the effect is sadly visible. The streets are cluttered with the wheeled instruments in which the drug is used. And the air is fouled with its miasmic fumes. And the poor folk who took to it in order to be free, in order to know flight from trouble, find themselves grooved into traffic lines, manacled by traffic laws, crawling like slaves under the haughty signals of the cop.

Verily, the hour calls for some great solver of problems to save the nation. I think at once of Mr. Henry Ford. He has been so successful in solving our transportation problems. He has earned so much wealth in that beneficent task. And he has shown himself so eager to go on serving his people—if possible, in bigger, better ways! Has he no scheme for curbing the evil uses of this Thing which causes our noble countrymen to roll along the landside in a complacent stupor?

1927