Word: spirit
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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With almost three years of a busy and hectic life behind him and still no signs of gray hairs or rheumatism, the Vagabond has begun to feel that some sort of spirit of eternal youth has come to his support. Ashamed as he may be of such indications of immaturity at most times of the year, the holiday season now in full swing makes him completely at home...
Christmas is quite another thing. All the brains that have been racked and paper wasted in vain attempts to analyse the spirit of Christmas show how little any of us know about it after the first ten magical years of our life are over. It needs a supreme disregard of physical limitations and an indifference to the more material things of the world that only a few divinely gifted men retain after they have lost their ignorance of them. Dickens knew the secret when he wrote that spiritual epic "The Christmas Carol". Not many Bob Cratchits can quite forget...
...value to begin the study of geography in the lowest grades of grammar schools. It is further considered practicable to end this study when pupils arrive at what are called years of discretion. The purpose of such an arrangement is doubtlessly in order to impress youthful minds with the spirit of discovery and adventure. Another aspect, however, is apparent; it is found that by the mere association of ideas children can easily connect Brazil with nuts. Ceylon with tea, or even Java with coffee. By this method, they learn to the exclusion of more important facts what goes under...
Nevertheless one doubts the absolute permanence of the seal. The glorious afternoon is after all only a memory College spirit takes its bumps periodically; and underneath this periodicity there is clearly a proportion to that scorned symbol of Rotarianism, Success. The appeals of an infuriated group of cheer-leaders waver feebly when the last white line is ninety yards away. There is no entity less abstract in its origins and manifestations than college spirit, and why it should be symbolized and paraded as a Platonic soul-affair, or a causeless hatred in perpetuam, is a mystery...
Beset by doubts, historical philosophers base their theories on one certitude. Civilizations are never static. They are always in motion, creatively toward stronger outpourings of their spirit or destructively toward decay and dissolution. Thus Western civilization, with its vaulting expression in Gothic cathedrals, Beethoven, da Vinci, Einstein, Manhattan's sun-smitten towers, is either seething onward toward mightier transactions, more luminous cultural & scientific manifestations, or suffering the nervous, senile disintegration which desolated Rome, Egypt, ancient China...