United States or Saudi Arabia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill the world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole civilization, seems to me to re-echo this planlessness, this indeterminate confusion of purpose. Plain issues are harder and harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared. Simple living is the countryman come to town. We are deafened and jostled and perplexed.
Planlessness naturally characterized the exertions of the Anglo-Saxon delegates from start to finish. It is a racial trait. Their hosts, who were experts in the traditions of diplomacy, had before the opening of the Conference prepared a plan for their behoof, which at the lowest estimate would have connoted a vast improvement on their own desultory way of proceeding.
It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others.
But the planlessness of average human nature was of course the measure of his opportunity; and he smiled to think that every purposeless face he met was a guarantee of his own advancement, a rung in the ladder he meant to climb. Yes, the whole secret of success was to know what one wanted to do, and not to be afraid to do it. His own history was proving that already.
I spoke of slackness and planlessness. "I've come back in search of efficiency." I have no doubt I said that at any rate. "We're trying to run this big empire," I may have explained, "with under-trained, under-educated, poor-spirited stuff, and we shall come a cropper unless we raise our quality. I'm still Imperialist, more than ever I was. But I'm an Imperialist on a different footing.
Before long he found too that he was seeing a new people. Storekeepers he knew, as being of his own guild; the small towns were much like Delafield, when you had become used to their newer crudeness of architecture and their sprawling planlessness; and the people who used hardware were very much like his customers at home.
Where there is even a glimmer of intelligence, ends are recognized and means to their attainment are chosen. Ends are compared, and the preference is given to some over others. But, with all this, there may be much incoherence and planlessness. Men can live somehow without looking far into the future, or keeping well in mind the lessons to be learned from the past.
He gave me two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism, as the Fabians expound it.
Word Of The Day