From the Well of Experience

Into the well of experience I cast my bucket in quest of a new wisdom, and behold, the bucket came down and settled but spans below the surface of the water; as for the deep abysses wrapped in the unknown, their enchanted locks open only at the knock of the old buckets which, from long practice, have come to know how to find their way to the heart of the well, and to its bottom...

I drew my bucket up hastily from the well of experience, and behold, the bucket, for all its smallness and the shallowness of the water it held, was brimming to its lips with perplexities. And wonder seized me — utter wonder — at a stout giant, tall of stature, who crowded me from my place at the edge of the well, while the people around us fought over a drop of water; so I shrank back, awed, at his side... What if it should occur to him to lift his thick foot and bring it down upon me, and make an end of me?... But nothing of the sort happened; the tall giant contented himself with darting at me, every now and then, glances of fire that all but devoured me in rage and envy. Why should I, insignificant as I am, have a bucket that ladles up for me from the well wisdom upon wisdom, while he, the great, great giant, spreads two empty hands in the air, staring in vain at people's full buckets, unable to comprehend a single letter of their wisdom, or to untie one of its obscure symbols?

And I set my bucket down amid the throng of people, amid their clamor and their din, to read from it the wisdom of its day, hungry for knowledge and for the sounding of its depths.

The first thing that grew clear to my eyes was that life is a struggle, and that man was made for toil and effort, winning of success and victory in the measure of his diligence and striving; his shares in life rise and fall in proportion to that striving and that diligence.

Some objector, no doubt, could bring forward any number of anecdotes to prove, contrary to what I have claimed, that luck alone plays with our destinies as it pleases, and that our radiant prosperity, or our scowling, gloomy ruin, is but the result of a stray arrow that luck shoots at random. Otherwise, what is it that makes one man, between one night and the next, drown in riches up to his ears, while another man no sooner turns his face toward some green bend of earth than the bend goes barren and blighted in his face, and he falls back from it in despair to another, only to meet the second time with what befell him the first?

And here the voice of the bucket rose, saying: Know, O you who seek my wisdom, that this thing they call luck comes down to this: that no one of us prospers except as the fruit of seizing the passing opportunities, when they suddenly disclose to him one of their luminous faces. These opportunities are nothing lasting; they are more like flashes of lightning that gleam in our lives for a fleeting instant, and soon return to their former darkness... Whoever wishes to profit by their light answers their call and clings fast to them, and they raise him to their heights and show him wonder upon wonder; but he whose eyes go dim, so that he shuts his lids against their blazing glow — his case is the case of the dullards whose courage betrays them in the hour of need, so that they go blind to the profit of this flash of good, and lurk in their cowardice and failure, crouching in their places, denying every man who prospers in life, because luck, in their reckoning, is his slave alone, obeying him and trailing his footsteps, submissive and abject... Little do such men know that the flash of luck does not come to them every day, nor every year; it may hold back from them and turn away, so that never again, all their lives long, do they glimpse a spark of its fire... Our luck, then, is the work of our own hands: it is the fruit of our seizing the chances as they offer, and backing them with a grip of resolve, activity, wisdom, and courage.

*

And I flung my bucket into the well anew, keeping clear of my neighbor, the tall giant, avoiding any brush with the coarseness of his frame and of his character, lest I suffer from it what I had no wish to suffer. And I gazed into the heart of the bucket, peering into its depths with longing, to make out what useful wisdom might have clung to its lips; and behold: people are of two kinds. One builds his glory upon the ruins of others, and life is sweet to him only as a parasite, abject and shifty, who spends his days and his nights weaving nets and setting traps, to snare this man and trip that one, bragging in his loud voice, making all manner of crooked claims built upon slander and hypocrisy... And a man who believes in nothing but the sweat of his brow and the whetting of his mind as the source of his livelihood, in the straight and open road and the sure, honest step... And victory belongs to the latter: however it tarry and delay, it rarely disowns this second kind, or turns its back upon them, heedless of their positive spirit, clear in its aims and its ends; and material triumph, in this feverish material age, will belong only to the positive — positive in their deeds and in their words... Even the consciences of these men are for the most part wrapped in sound and good intentions: they climb the ladder step by step — they do not deliberately hurl down in treachery those who have gone ahead of them, nor do they hinder the caravan's march out of envy and smallness of soul.

And here the voice of the bucket broke forth, loud and quavering like the voice of thunder:

And man — what has man to do with this long, exhausting toil, wearing his feet bare, quenching the burning flame of youth in his veins, in pursuit of the piaster?... Can this piaster be man's far goal and the dream of his

heart, for which he dies a thousand deaths, searching for it, digging for its hiding places, so that at the last he may store up a handful of it to retire upon, secure and content?... And who says that man, once he has gained this handful of piasters, sees his ambitions turn back upon their heels, and returns to the fold of safety and peace of mind, and reaches his goal?

Woe, all woe, to those who imagine that matter alone is the end of our contention and our scrambling, in darkness and in light, in cold and in heat... The piasters that enter our pockets by way of a salary or by way of trade are but a means of securing the morsel of bread, the roof, the light, and the garment we cover ourselves with... piasters that come and go; we take them in here to pay them out there, and nothing of them remains to us but the deep moral trace, but the golden, goodly memory.

Truly I say to you, O seeker of wisdom: in a poem a poet composes, or an essay a man of letters adorns with his pen... in a painting or a statue — even in a dress finely wrought, on which the tailor has spent notable pains — in all of these, and in many others besides, there is a sufficiency and a recompense that all the wealth of the earth cannot equal... And your children, your portraits in miniature, your living poems — are they not the most beautiful trace that remains after you? Do the fortunes of the whole world weigh in the balance against these noble, fresh monuments, these statues pulsing with life and warmth?

The bucket's talk pleased my ear and delighted me; my soul thrilled and opened at the fall of its phrases. Perhaps it was the feeling of motherhood in me that woke and stirred to the sweet song, plaintive of melody; the noble passions and feelings answered one another within me, and my eyes brimmed over with tears for a reason whose nature I did not know. And I implored my bucket, which I had filled with a fresh gush from the well of experience — I implored it to give me more, and to speak to me at fuller length... And it said:

It is a tiny minority among mankind that was fashioned for creation and invention, capable of setting down a legislative or literary or artistic monument, and of leaving to humanity a heritage firm of pillar, one that guarantees its author some measure of glory and a sufficiency to satisfy his ambition... And the rest of mankind, apart from this creative minority, are like a huge flock, massing behind a leader or a chieftain and doing his bidding. Yet this does not prevent every human being of this huge flock from having a mission clear in its aims. And all a man's works are directed, according to a particular order and a drawn plan, toward accomplishing this mission in the best way possible. And the mission of the ordinary man

of limited creative capacity — like most of these people crowding at the edge of the well — is nothing other than the preservation of the race and the building of the family entrusted to them: building it solidly, to make it an indivisible unit of a better national society!

Here I drew close to the bucket, until my face leaned over its face, touching it, lest any of its wisdoms be lost to me, for I felt that its speech had now reached a stage closely bound up with me and with the daughters of my sex; and I said to myself: enough reward for this long stand of mine at the well — enough, if I should succeed in the end in carrying this precious message to them.

And I strained my ears, craning forward, looking with heart and eye toward whatever my bucket might utter this time, and I heard it say:

Perhaps what most occupies my mind is the destiny of our family in this patch of earth. I have followed the stages that have pressed upon it as it passed from phase to phase, and I have witnessed at close hand the process by which authority seeps gradually from the hands of the fathers and passes into the hands of the rising generation, in step with the demands of modern education and in keeping with the spirit of the age. And there is one thing that is an inescapable necessity, complementary to this education in self-reliance — a thing I have felt for in our homes and in our midst and found scarcely a trace of: I mean sound national guidance. For your children, having been given freedom of thought and action, lack this conscious guidance that would foster faith and conviction in their hearts and open before their eyes broad horizons of lofty national pride and reverence for the spirit of heroism; for there is nothing like such directive education to strengthen the young generation's confidence in themselves, lift their spirits, and set them face to face with the reality of their place in their society and in their homeland, of which they will be the stones that build its foundation, its walls, and its roof.

Your children go trailing in a thousand kinds of soft, luxurious clothing, and in delicious, nourishing foods which you offer them lavishly on silvered dishes and which they devour with spoons of gold; but these foods, however abundant in kind and in quantity, will never be wholly sound, complete in all the elements of nutrition, so long as they lack the elixir of national manhood, clear in its resolve, clear in its aim... How far are your children from this that I want for them! Do you not see with me that they are poor lost creatures in this chaotic family machine, floundering in it blindly, groping alone in the darkness, in vain, for the straight road that will bring them to the highway of peace, to an ideal family and a better society?

And what invites optimism is that the possibilities of your family today are wider in range than they were in times past; it has become able, at the least, to soar upon two wings of equal strength, whereas before this era it had but a single wing with which to beat the air, veering in its flight, dragging behind it a faithful, crippled wing that took shelter under the protection of its strong twin for fear of harm.

It is, beyond doubt, a mighty leap, that which this era has recorded for the women of this country; and no long time will pass before we feel the echo of this leap and its positive effect — and of the leaps that will follow it — in every quarter of our social life; for they will all work together to make firm the bonds of the family and knit its parts, and so help it to trace the landmarks of the road toward the society we seek.

And woman today, having recovered her full political right, has recovered her confidence in herself, and has grown certain that it is her right to be a citizen, with a capacity for work and for positive, constructive production no less than man's; and that only by their cooperation together will the two rebuild our dear homeland, which was near to tottering and collapsing, part upon part...

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My bucket ended its talk panting with weariness, and I turned away from it slowly, to where I might gather my scattered thoughts and look deeply into its sayings and take them in word by word, flooded by a strong feeling that its speech, for all its apparent simplicity, holds a broad practical philosophy deserving of study and of wide currency.

And as I convey to you in brief the talk of my bucket from the well of experience, I convey it with reserve, asking myself: what, I wonder, were the buckets of the people around me at the well saying, as they jostled with shoulders and elbows? And that stout giant, tall of stature — is he, I wonder, still at the well, arms flung wide, glaring at people's buckets with dull, foolish stares, unable to comprehend a single word of their wisdom, or to solve one of its locked riddles?!