Toward Rainbow's End
594 TOWARD RAINBOW'S END CPRINGTIME always has the strange effect of ^ making men enjoy their basic restlessness. Whereas all other forms of life go earnestly about their business—the...
...Pascal was wholly right when he noted somewhat mournfully that the recipe for solid virtue is sitting alone in a room...
...The charm of a career like that of Captain Lawrence, or of the book written round that career, lies precisely in its stimulus to the universal hunger to go and do likewise...
...Whereas all other forms of life go earnestly about their business—the beasts coming from their holes and the trees flinging round them their aery, fruitful gardens—human beings stare into the distance and yearn for nothing so much as the mists that hang round Cathay or Valladolid...
...Great explorers and adventurers carry mankind with them, as not even the poets can...
...595...
...Nor are the trim modern highways, made of selected concrete and asphalt for the benefit of vehicles, favorable to those who wish to act on the advice of Hazlitt or Thoreau and get themselves away for a spell from mere human gewgaws...
...Ours is a life and a literature of travel...
...Of course, it is a spendthrift, impractical urge, this instinct to wander and inhale the breath of unknown cities and visionary mountain-peaks...
...Even Mr...
...Over us all the rainbow casts its tranquil spell, but what really matters to us is rainbow's end...
...Even so, regions beyond number are admirably adapted to walking...
...But Americans, sad to say, are not a nation of pedestrians, earnest efforts to make them so to the contrary notwithstanding...
...Europe and the South Seas have been the twin antipodes of the national mind...
...It is interesting to discern how the habit of roaming still persists in our letters, in spite of so many earnest recommendations to utilize native materials...
...We lack the sturdy habit of measuring distance by hours, which is so protective of the roots of European culture...
...There are places where a lonely walker, anxious to enjoy the hills and the surviving forest verdure, can hardly proceed because of commiserating autoists and wagondrivers who halt and volunteer relief...
...But Pascal's wisdom precluded his own coming to America, quite as most Americans are restrained from going toward his wisdom...
...California is leagues away from Maine...
...And perhaps it would be a wise idea to scatter similar places of devotion round about this land...
...An older age, possessing the lore of symbols, saw that the yearning to go down long highways was a reflection of the final human eagerness to escape from the trammels of earth...
...Yet these must all be known if the contour of America is to become familiar and heart's desire to be stilled...
...But apart from writing, the art of life is here most truly a nomad practice...
...the softness of Virginia is worlds apart from the ruggedness of northern Minnesota...
...With each spring, the wanderer became a pilgrim to any one of the myriad shrines which, identified with flowered valleys or mountain snows, were nevertheless reminders of the ultimate human business for which all seasons prepare...
...Our landscapes are so distributed that one must leap from coast to coast to enjoy the same variety that is offered by compact countries like France or Italy...
...Sinclair Lewis goes to London and writes from the satiric vantage point of—is it Mars or Mercury...
...Those who enjoy wandering through the spring would, then, not be suspected of mere loitering or of side-stepping from a universally ordained efficiency...
...A facetious critic might even opine that because we have got so much of romanticism out of our feet, we have all the more of it in our heads...
...The Berkshires and the Blue Ridge hills, the rolling greens of Kentucky and Connecticut, the lake country of New York and Wisconsin— all these might conceivably have won the lasting affection of Rousseau...
...By comparison, New Yorkers and Bostonians probably do considerably more traveling on foot than do the citizens of rural districts...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 22
