REPOSE IN ACTIVITY

What we want is repose.  We take infinite trouble and go to the ends of the world to get it.  That is what makes us all so restless.  If we could only find a spot where we could sit down, content to let the world go by, away from the Sunday newspapers and the chronicles of an uneasy society, we think we should be happy.  Perhaps such a place is Coronado Beach —­that semi-tropical flower-garden by the sea.  Perhaps another is the Timeo Terrace at Taormina.  There, without moving, one has the most exquisite sea and shore far below him, so far that he has the feeling of domination without effort; the most picturesque crags and castle peaks; he has all classic legend under his eye without the trouble of reading, and mediaeval romance as well; ruins from the time of Theocritus to Freeman, with no responsibility of describing them; and one of the loveliest and most majestic of snow mountains, never twice the same in light and shade, entirely revealed and satisfactory from base to summit, with no self or otherwise imposed duty of climbing it.  Here are most of the elements of peace and calm spirit.  And the town itself is quite dead, utterly exhausted after a turbulent struggle of twenty-five hundred years, its poor inhabitants living along only from habit.  The only new things in it—­the two caravansaries of the traveler—­are a hotel and a cemetery.  One might end his days here in serene retrospection, and more cheaply than in other places of fewer attractions, for it is all Past and no Future.  Probably, therefore, it would not suit the American, whose imagination does not work so easily backward as forward, and who prefers to build his own nest rather than settle in anybody else’s rookery.  Perhaps the American deceives himself when he says he wants repose; what he wants is perpetual activity and change; his peace of mind is postponed until he can get it in his own way.  It is in feeling that he is a part of growth and not of decay.  Foreigners are fond of writing essays upon American traits and characteristics.  They touch mostly on surface indications.  What really distinguishes the American from all others—­for all peoples like more or less to roam, and the English of all others are globe-trotters—­is not so much his restlessness as his entire accord with the spirit of “go-ahead,” the result of his absolute breaking with the Past.  He can repose only in the midst of intense activity.  He can sit down quietly in a town that is growing rapidly; but if it stands still, he is impelled to move his rocking-chair to one more lively.  He wants the world to move, and to move unencumbered; and Europe seems to him to carry too much baggage.  The American is simply the most modern of men, one who has thrown away the impedimenta of tradition.  The world never saw such a spectacle before, so vast a territory informed with one uniform spirit of energy and progress, and people tumbling into it from all the world, eager for the fair field and free opportunity.  The American delights in it; in Europe he misses the swing and “go” of the new life.