CROSSING THE OCEAN : :
Otto, Max Carl
CROSSING THE OCEAN : : By MAX CARL OTTO Professor Max ('. Otto of the University of Wisconsin and Mrs. Otto, known to many of our readers as Rhoda Owen, are spending several months in Europe,...
...Seventy^five against a thou-pand...
...Therefore the first topic should naturally be the sea...
...There is one tell-tale difference — the quality of the water...
...Oh...
...I see, you are talking about the American Revolution," said the listener...
...she said with almost a tear in the voice, "and now "the Bolsheviks want to ruin our country...
...When in the night the clouds drifted aside and Orion swung for an occasional moment in and out of the rigging, he seemed in contrast, for all his incalculable distance, a friend to man...
...In parting I urged them to write something of their observations and experiences abroad for LA FOLLETTE'S...
...MEANWHILE the sea tossed on, indifferent to Patriot and Bolshevik...
...It is of the genus' of rivers and rains...
...asked her untutored neighbor...
...A woman from Iowa is evidence...
...There are things, however, that strike even the casual observer and set him to speculating...
...They did it for freedom," she said, "that's what they did it for...
...With all land out of sight, thirty miles of water are as effective as three thousand...
...They have named a street after it in Boston, you know...
...But who, not born to write, can justify his attempting the topic...
...But taking this great tossing expanse as it is seen, it might be s. stretch of Lake Michigan, with Grand Haven just over the edge, instead of the Atlantic, with Land's End more than a thousand miles beyond the rim to the east where the pale-lavender dragon-cloud crawls stealthily south ward...
...let that be left for _ someone else, at any rate for someone else who proved a better sailor or has forgotten his misery...
...Then it says, 'They fired the shot heard round the world.' You bot the...
...Her great-great-grandfather, she confided with a touch of pride to her deck-chair neighbor, was "something or other in the English nobility...
...Seventy-five of them...
...As this organ begins to pitch and roll the veTy looks of things change, tastes and odors are transformed, people are altered, philosophies of life collapse...
...With most of us processes of memory and anticipation get mixed with sense experiences, and thus what we know to be true fuses with what we actually sec...
...And now the Bolsheviks want to ruin our country...
...IT IS known that those who go to Europe cross the ocean...
...There, in due time, he was one of the seventy-five heroes who stood up against a thousand English soldiers...
...And if we were imagining a new myth of creation, one might derive our lakes from the rains that fell upon this earth when the first moist atmosphere had been found, and the oceans from the solutions produced by ages of weatherina of rocks and hills...
...As the sun went down, turning the purples, bhies greens to copper, it seemed as if one looked down upon an enormous bowl carved out of the universe, filled with an unearthly liquid, and left to play its independent game...
...One carries one's spatial horizon wherever one goes and this trims the scene to the same circle...
...ONE CAN'T be long at sea without learning how important in the economy of the erganism the stomach is...
...British heard it...
...But whatever the explanation, there is this difference in experienced quality...
...The sea doesn't appear as large as it should, not larger than our great lakes...
...Even in their wildest moods, they seem somehow akin to human passion...
...Seventy-five—" "And," interjected the other, "they did it for freedom...
...who produces an illuminating Sinograph, the Topic, "Religious, Philosophic, and Social Aberrations in Relation io Gastronomic Gyrations.'' * « » FINALLY, it is to be noted thai patriotism suffers no sea change...
...nevertheless one will scarcely be out of sight of land when it will be clear that the power that rocks the stomach rules the world...
...And the upshot of it all is that what is strange is apt to seem hard and indifferent and the familiar warm and closer of kin...
...Otto, known to many of our readers as Rhoda Owen, are spending several months in Europe, En-route to New York they stopped off in Washington and were our guests while Dr...
...Our lake water seems water to the last ultimate bit...
...Yes," the patriotic lady went on, "that's how it started, those seventy-five standing up to the thousand, by that bridge, how does it go now?— 'By the rude bridge that spanned the flood' Then there is something about fanners, 1 always forget that part...
...Otto has respoused to my request promptly with the following sketch of the sea voyage in which philosophy, humor and poetry are delightfully blended.— B. C. I...
...When a wave breaks into spray, innumerable tiny sparkling bits of its original substance appear to be flung into the air, then rolled rapidly along the receding trough to sink from sight at the bottom...
...Anyway, he didn't like that sort of thing, so he came to Massachusetts...
...She had forgotten just what...
...It is what lies between that gives a sense of greater or lesser distance...
...Where was that...
...Yes, that's what they did it for...
...So the ocean appears cold, self-contained, indifferent to the life that teems on its shores or the gulls that mount and dip gracefully over its bosom...
...Why, at Lexington," she replied with heightened interest...
...while our lakes appear warm, part of the great world, bound up with all they touch...
...And they did it for freedom, that's what they did it for...
...There is a name to be made by the man or woman who wins for the stomach the psychological dominance it holds in fact...
...Otto delivered a series of lectures at the Brookings School...
...If one listens one may hear a moan of sympathy for those they destroy...
...Thus ocean-water seems hard, brittle, as if it were liquefied granite...
...Psychology may stress the basic function of the nervous system, may make it responsible for the character of mental processes and the responses made to the world, and may neglect the psychic significance of the digestive system...
...And the British have never forgiven them, because they knocked them so hard...
Vol. 19 • April 1927 • No. 4
