How to Do It?

“To let the sick part of our soul just be still and recover; to make our alcoholized tissues just do their work long enough on plain water — that, if we can but do it, is all the sweeping and garnishing needed to make us possible dwelling-places again for the vitalizing spirit of sane delight in whatever adventure befalls us. How, then, to do it? Not, I fancy, by any kind of pow-wow or palaver of congress, conference, general committee, sub-committee, or other expedient for talking in company instead of working alone. This is an individual’s job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies, whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves — the hero stunt, the sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war spite, war rant and cant of every kind; and to do it all, not in a sentimental mood of self-pity like some actor mounting in an empty theatre and thinking what treasures the absent audience has lost, but like a man on a sheep-farm in the mountains, as much alone and at peace with his work of maintaining the world as God was when he made it.

“You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the advanced architecture of conduct was built — the solemn temples of creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).