1924

Going to St. Louis today a portly and garrulous gentleman sat back of me and became very much interested in two nuns who were reading their prayerbooks. The man, who seemed the perfect type of successful drummer, felt very superior to the nuns. How can anyone “fall for that stuff” in this day and age, he wanted to know in a loud whisper. “They remind me of ghosts,” he said.

I had to admit that there was something almost unearthly about these black figures with their white-rimmed hoods. But their faces were kindly and human, and the face of the drummer was sensuous and florid. Perhaps the difference between him and the nuns illustrates the quality of our “modernity,” though I don’t want to maintain that he is the perfect type of a modern man. But we do have a great many moderns who are emancipated from every kind of religious discipline without achieving any new loyalty which might qualify the brutal factors in human life.

It is better that life incarnate some ideal value, even if mixed with illusion, (though anything which has the spirit of love in it is not wholly illusion) than that it should express nothing but the will to live. My drummer thinks of himself as a modern in comparison with those nuns. I looked at him squatting there and glanced again at the homely but beautiful faces of the nuns and said to myself: What is modern and what is ancient? Were there not toads before there were ghosts and fairies?