Make
of your homeward car a mental gymnasium. Each night or morning,
take up some one line of thought and follow it to its end--or as
far as your mind can take you. Learn to observe, to study, to
reflect. Don't look at your fellow passengers as calves look at
each other on the way to the slaughter house.
Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or
stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain,
brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us
here.
They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time
in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts
passing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought
to stir you. ----
The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to
them--blessed youth!--should interest you deeply. And the negro,
too, with a tired black face, resting for the next day's
slavery--slavery on a wage basis, but slavery all the same.
Possibly you despise his thick lips. But those lips are carved
on every sphinx in Egypt's sand, and if you could go back far
enough you would find the ancestors of that negro, before the
days of the Pharaohs, laying the foundations of your religion and
locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were
gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh.
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