The Clipping

I carried the clipping with me wherever I went, hoping for a chance to sit down alone and read it at my leisure. It was a quotation from an unknown 16th Century saint and because it had seemed to supply a need for the war-torn world of the 20th Century, I had cut it out and kept it with me.

And now the time seemed to have come for its real and final reading. I sat before my fire on the lonely shore of a lake far north in the Canadian wilderness. It was a time for meditation and reflection, a time for thinking long thoughts without interruption. I dug the worn bit of paper out of my wallet and began to read.

"Do not lose your inward peace for anything whatsoever even if the whole world seems upset. Never hurry, do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Maintain a holy simplicity of mind and do not smother yourself with a host of cares, wishes or longings."

I read those immortal words in the flickering light of my fire with the peace of the Canadian wilderness all about me, with the echoing calls of the loons far out over the water and the white throats and hermits from the woods about me and right then they seemed particularly fitting, but then I thought of the factories running three shifts and of the pressure under which men must prepare for war. I thought of the boys in Sicily, in the Aleutians and the Solomons and wondered if they had any time for calmness or leisure and knew that such a philosophy was not for a time of war.

But I also thought of Thoreau, of Emerson, of the Roman sage and emperor Marcus Aurelius, and knew that their philosophy was the same, that to maintain a holy simplicity of mind was the secret of happiness and contentment, that to keep one's life uncluttered was the key to successful living, no matter when or how men fared.

The fire had burned down and it was rapidly getting dark. My tent was up, my sleeping bag safely within it. The canoe was overturned on shore with my supplies under its shelter. All of my bodily wants were satisfied and I for one was at peace with myself and my environment.

As I crawled into my sleeping bag, I was still thinking about what I had read and then I began to understand its real meaning and how it could apply no matter where men were. A man did not have to be away from his kind and the many problems that beset civilization. A man if he were big enough could maintain that "holy simplicity of mind" amid the crash of battle, amid the turmoil of great industry, anywhere if he really wished. No one could deprive him of it. The philosophy of four centuries ago was as true today as it was then.