ulses
keep thrusting him through his cycle of quaint tasks! And in every
human heart you find some sorrow, some frustration, some lurking pang.
I often think of Lafcadio Hearn's story of his Japanese cook. Hearn
was talking of the Japanese habit of not showing their emotions on
their faces. His cook was a smiling, healthy, agreeable-looking young
fellow whose face was always cheerful. Then one day, by chance, Hearn
happened to look through a hole in the wall and saw his cook alone.
His face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showed
strange lines worn by old hardships or sufferings. Hearn thought to
himself, "He will look just like that when he is dead." He went into
the kitchen to see him, and instantly the cook was all changed, young
and happy again. Never again did Hearn see that face of trouble; but
he knew the man wore it when he was alone.

Don't you think there is a kind of parable there for the race as a
whole? Have you ever met a man without wondering what shining sorrows
he hides from the world, what contrast between vision and
accomplishment torments him? Behind every smiling mask is there not
some cryptic grimace of pain? Henry Adams puts it tersely. He says
the human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown
and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental
chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own
ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's
compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in
instruments and averages. After sixty years or so of growing
astonishment the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the
void of death. And, as Adams says, that it should profess itself
pleased by this performance is all that the highest rules of good
breeding can ask. That the mind should actually be satisfied would
prove that it exists only as idiocy!

I hope that you will write to tell me along what curves your mind is
moving. For my own part I feel that we are on the verge of amazing
things. Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers.
They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human
race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands
of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished
happiness. I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, and
have purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill I