The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adventures In Contentment, by David Grayson

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Title: Adventures In Contentment

Author: David Grayson
AKA: Ray Stannard Baker

Release Date: January 5, 2004 [EBook #10605]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT_

David Grayson

I

"THE BURDEN OF THE VALLEY OF VISION"

I came here eight years ago as the renter of this farm, of which soon
afterward I became the owner. The time before that I like to forget. The
chief impression it left, upon my memory, now happily growing
indistinct, is of being hurried faster than I could well travel. From
the moment, as a boy of seventeen, I first began to pay my own way, my
days were ordered by an inscrutable power which drove me hourly to my
task. I was rarely allowed to look up or down, but always forward,
toward that vague Success which we Americans love to glorify.

My senses, my nerves, even my muscles were continually strained to the
utmost of attainment. If I loitered or paused by the wayside, as it
seems natural for me to do, I soon heard the sharp crack of the lash.
For many years, and I can say it truthfully, I never rested. I neither
thought nor reflected. I had no pleasure, even though I pursued it
fiercely during the brief respite of vacations. Through many feverish
years I did not work: I merely produced.

The only real thing I did was to hurry as though every moment were my
last, as though the world, which now seems so rich in everything, held
only one prize which might be seized upon before I arrived. Since then I
have tried to recall, like one who struggles to restore the visions of a
fever, what it was that I ran to attain, or why I should have borne
without rebellion such indignities to soul and body. That life seems
now, of all illusions, the most distant and unreal. It is like the
unguessed eternity before we are born: not of concern compared with that
eternity upon which we are now embarked.

All these things