“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”
A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest
Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the chase. The rabbit
sped down the river, turned off into a small creek, up the frozen bed
of which it held steadily. It ran lightly on the surface of the snow,
while the dogs ploughed through by main strength. Buck led the pack,
sixty strong, around bend after bend, but he could not gain. He lay
down low to the race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing
forward, leap by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap,
like some pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.
All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men
out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by
chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to
kill—all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was
ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the
living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes
in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which
life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes
when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that
one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the
artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to
the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it
came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining
after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through
the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the
parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb
of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave
of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in
that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and
rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the
stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the
pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long
bend around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the
frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and
larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate
path of the rabbit.
“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
I stood on the porch and knocked, and they
looked out at me through the window. They even held one sturdy little
boy aloft so that he could see over the shoulders of his elders the
tramp who wasn't going to get anything to eat at their house.
It began to look as if I should be compelled to go to the very poor
for my food. The very poor constitute the last sure recourse of the
hungry tramp. The very poor can always be depended upon. They never
turn away the hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have
I been refused food by the big house on the hill; and always have I
received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with
its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken
with labor. Oh, you charity-mongers! Go to the poor and learn, for the
poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from
their excess. They have no excess. They give, and they withhold never,
from what they need for themselves, and very often from what they
cruelly need for themselves. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity
is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the
dog.
There was one house in particular where I was turned down that
evening. The porch windows opened on the dining room, and through them
I saw a man eating pie--a big meat-pie. I stood in the open door, and
while he talked with me, he went on eating. He was prosperous, and out
of his prosperity had been bred resentment against his less fortunate
brothers.
He cut short my request for something to eat, snapping out, "I don't
believe you want to work."
Now this was irrelevant. I hadn't said anything about work. The topic
of conversation I had introduced was "food." In fact, I didn't want to
work. I wanted to take the westbound overland that night.
"You wouldn't work if you had a chance," he bullied.
I glanced at his meek-faced wife, and knew that but for the presence
of this Cerberus I'd have a whack at that meat-pie myself. But
Cerberus sopped himself in the pie, and I saw that I must placate him
if I were to get a share of it. So I sighed to myself and accepted his
work-morality.
“I wrote a thousand words every day”
When I was alone, writing or studying, I had no need
for it. But--I was growing old, or wise, or both, or senile as an
alternative. When I was in company I was less pleased, less excited,
with the things said and done. Erstwhile worth-while fun and stunts
seemed no longer worth while; and it was a torment to listen to the
insipidities and stupidities of women, to the pompous, arrogant sayings
of the little half-baked men. It is the penalty one pays for reading the
books too much, or for being oneself a fool. In my case it does not
matter which was my trouble. The trouble itself was the fact. The
condition of the fact was mine. For me the life, and light, and sparkle
of human intercourse were dwindling.
I had climbed too high among the stars, or, maybe, I had slept too hard.
Yet I was not hysterical nor in any way overwrought. My pulse was
normal. My heart was an amazement of excellence to the insurance
doctors. My lungs threw the said doctors into ecstasies. I wrote a
thousand words every day. I was punctiliously exact in dealing with all
the affairs of life that fell to my lot. I exercised in joy and
gladness. I slept at night like a babe. But--
Well, as soon as I got out in the company of others I was driven to
melancholy and spiritual tears. I could neither laugh with nor at the
solemn utterances of men I esteemed ponderous asses; nor could I laugh,
nor engage in my old-time lightsome persiflage, with the silly
superficial chatterings of women, who, underneath all their silliness and
softness, were as primitive, direct, and deadly in their pursuit of
biological destiny as the monkeys women were before they shed their furry
coats and replaced them with the furs of other animals.
And I was not pessimistic. I swear I was not pessimistic. I was merely
bored. I had seen the same show too often, listened too often to the
same songs and the same jokes. I knew too much about the box office
receipts. I knew the cogs of the machinery behind the scenes so well
that the posing on the stage, and the laughter and the song, could not
drown the creaking of the wheels behind.
“. . . there was about him a suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.”
But at the end of several minutes
two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.
He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field.
White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with
wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field
he dragged down and slew the dog.
With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word
went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not
molest the Fighting Wolf.
CHAPTER IV
THE CALL OF KIND
The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone
was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
like a flower planted in good soil.
And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law
even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in
him and the wolf in him merely slept.
He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his
kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his
puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion
for dogs. The natural course of his life had been diverted, and,
recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused
in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always
with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand,
learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked
fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to
send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
But there was one trial in White Fang’s life—Collie. She never gave him
a moment’s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She defied
all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men
out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by
chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to
kill—all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was
ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the
living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes
in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which
life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes
when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that
one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the
artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to
the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it
came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining
after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through
the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the
parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb
of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave
of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in
that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and
rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the
stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the
pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long
bend around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the
frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and
larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate
path of the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the
white teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a
stricken man may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging
down from Life’s apex in the grip of Death, the full pack at Buck’s
heels raised a hell’s chorus of delight.
Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon
Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They
rolled over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his feet almost
as though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down the shoulder
and leaping clear.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.
A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest
Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the chase. The rabbit
sped down the river, turned off into a small creek, up the frozen bed
of which it held steadily. It ran lightly on the surface of the snow,
while the dogs ploughed through by main strength. Buck led the pack,
sixty strong, around bend after bend, but he could not gain. He lay
down low to the race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing
forward, leap by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap,
like some pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.
All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men
out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by
chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to
kill—all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was
ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the
living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes
in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which
life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes
when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that
one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the
artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to
the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it
came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining
after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through
the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the
parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb
of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave
of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in
that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and
rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the
stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the
pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long
bend around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the
frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and
larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate
path of the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the
white teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a
stricken man may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging
down from Life’s apex in the grip of Death, the full pack at Buck’s
heels raised a hell’s chorus of delight.
Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds of rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. The supply is too large.
“But you read him misunderstandingly
when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton
destruction of life.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You know you only mean that in relation to
human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you destroy as
much as I or any other man. And human life is in no wise different,
though you feel it is and think that you reason why it is. Why should I
be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and without value? There
are more sailors than there are ships on the sea for them, more workers
than there are factories or machines for them. Why, you who live on the
land know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and
loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain more
poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which
is life destroyed), than you know what to do with. Have you ever seen
the London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?”
He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a final
word. “Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon
itself? And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity
prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as
if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies. To
you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept
his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life
demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck
like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. He
was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large. To himself
only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was,
being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated
himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread
out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does
not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose
anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.
Don’t you see? And what have you to say?”
“That you are at least consistent,” was all I could say, and I went on
washing the dishes.
CHAPTER VII
At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the
north-east trades. I came on deck, after a good night’s rest in spite of
my poor knee, to find the _Ghost_ foaming along, wing-and-wing, and every
sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern. Oh, the wonder
of the great trade-wind! All day we sailed, and all night, and the next
day, and the next, day after day, the wind always astern and blowing
steadily and strong.
“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
“You cant wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
“The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class”
“Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?”
“I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.”
“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea - cruising, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.”
I would rather be ashes than dust!I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.The function of man is to live, not to exist.I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.I shall use my time.
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
You cant wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all.Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well.The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants. magazine, March 1903)]
From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.
He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.
