January 16, 1930

Today I have read the life of John Burroughs and have been impressed with a strange similarity between his life and mine. He found the same inability to resign himself to business and the humdrum existence of commercial life. After teaching school for some ten years and nagged by an ambitious wife to try to put his good brain to some lucrative use, he tries anything that will give him a release but only to find that he cannot devote his mind to it. In the midst of figuring and worry he finds himself slipping away to do some scribbling as his friends called it. Many is the time he was discouraged and hopeless but there was always his outdoors to give him renewed strength and vision. I have been teaching for ten years with the same leisure he had, leisure devoted to rambles in the woods, reading and thinking. I have browsed among the philosophers perhaps more contemporary in their scope but not any more hampering than his. Mine have given me the best of modern thought explanations of the slow old theories he had but the result has been the same. I have gotten a broad scope and understanding of human nature and of man's relation to the universe that I could never have gotten any other way. What has my reading been through the past ten years if not a conscious search for the truth, the truth regarding religion, faith in God and immortality. I have read the beliefs of all the great thinkers of our day and have come to the conclusion that they know no more than I do myself. My belief in God and immortality is as strong as theirs and in many cases I know that mine is much more founded upon solidity than theirs. I know and that is more than many of them can say most of their beliefs are still hampered by their old inhibitions. No matter what their greatness or their standing it often happens that they have arrived at the ripeness or so-called supposed ripeness of maturity with nothing to show but the stereotyped ideas of books that they have read and ideas that have been drilled into them since youth. Or else they are still afraid to come out boldly and declare themselves. My reading and research has at least enabled me to draw definite conclusions that for me will never be altered. In that knowledge I have found a peace and an understanding of human motives that makes the most profound happening as transparent in its scope as spring water. True culture according to Zoroaster is when a man knows that he knows and knows what he does not know. I know that I know and I do not think the past ten years have been wasted in finding out.

I have been my own University. I did not being to get my education at school. All I learned there was enough to enable me to teach a primary subject and to earn my livelihood. That much I have it to thank for but for real understanding that I have my own tireless research and unconsciously well directed efforts to thank. Many is the time I have looked over the reading and thinking I have done during the last years with a pang of regret thinking of all the time wasted. At the time all of the satisfactions I did have was that it gave me pleasure. It brought me slowly to a peace and calmness that will never leave me.