University of Santa Clara - Redwood Yearbook (Santa Clara, CA)

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THE REDWOOD and how long we may pause. How dull it is to pause, says Ulysses in Tennyson; but in the same poet we find a beautiful pic- ture of repose in St. Agnes ' Eve. Maybe both qualities are laudatory and maybe both have their faults. At all events it will do no harm to delay on the nature of repose after having been re- galed in last month ' s Rkdwood by a plea for action. I. In the first place, what is repose? We find the word vari- ously used by various authors: Have ye chosen this place After the toil of battle to repose Your wearied virtue? asks Satan of the terrified companions of his fall; — and W. W. Hall tells us that the three best medicines in the world are warmth, abstinence and repose, ' ' while Emerson with his characteristic odd- ity speaks thus: ' ' Repose and cheerfulness are the badges of a gentleman. In all three quotations there is an approach to the root meaning of the word, but in Milton it is more than an ap- proach; it is the root meaning. Re-pauso, to pause, is a late Eatin term traceable however to the old Greek z , i x Mx: pause, which means to make an end, ' ' to put a stop to, so that in Tennyson ' s line: How dull it is to pause to make an end, we have similar terms which may also stand for the word before us, repose, with this limitation, that the afl x re must be taken to imply rest after work. Briefly then repose means the act of tak- ing rest or the state of being at rest after action. Now as there are mental activities and physical activities in man, there needs must be mental repose and physical repose and a combination of both, or absolute repose. The terms are self-ex- planatory and need but a few illustrations to be grasped in all their fullness of significance. Sleep, provided there be no dreams to call on mental activities, is typical of absolute repose. In fact it is the only type, for though sleep ' s brother, death, may suggest something even more absolute, the truth of the matter is that in the sleep of death there are dreams and more than dreams. Death may be taken as a perfect form of physical repose, because in death all the physical activities are suspended, while the powers of the mind become more active than ever. For an illustration of mental

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THE REDWOOD THE ETHICS OF REPOSE A Study of Tennyson ' s St. Agnes ' Eve and The lyOtus-Eaters. The advocates of the strenuous life have a mighty follow- ing, because the strenuous life, when it is displayed in all its vary- ing forms, appeals, as nothing else does, to the animal element in man. The strenuous life is a life of excitement and recreation and the lover of excitement and recreation takes to it much the same as the bee takes to honey. It is natural for man to be active, and so predominant has this natural craving become that there is no room nowadays for the contemplative, whether of the poetic or of the religious cast of mind. The age of poetry, some think, is gone and with it all love for quietude. The spirit of religion, according to others, though not quite dead, is growing more and more mili- tant. If brief the world is developing an inordinate love for ma- chinery in general and for autocycles and automobiles in particu- lar. Thought, real thought, is failing us because we have attached our hearts to the material, and for the most part, to the material in motion. For these and similar reasons I cannot understand the action of those who make an apostolate of strenuosity. The author.of the essay entitled ' Sir Galahad ' and ' Ulysses ' in last month ' s issue of the Redwood attempted something like this and boldly did he insist on activity. His principle was good enough in itself, but the application is apt to lead one into an erroneous view of life. With his ideas alone to guide us, we would forever be on the alert, forever in action and our minds would be in danger of death from starvation, while we pampered the flesh. For that too much physical activity, such as he advocated, is a species of flesh indul- gence is evident. The youth from eight to eighteen is by nature more active than his elders, but the beast is naturally more active than he. Wisdom is sedate; Frivolity is ever on the move. Not that I condemn strenuosity; it is, especially when guided by intelligence, a noble quality in any man; but because its oppo- site, passivity, has been oftentimes ennobled and elevated, it may be well to study both sides of the shield and to see when, where

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THE REDWOOD repose, as distinct from the absolute, we seek in vain. The mind of man must work; it is a restless, energetic, tireless agent and its activities cannot be suspended except in sleep. But that is abso- lute repose, and what we want is a type of mental repose as dis- tinct from the absolute and from the physical. The dumb ox would serve the purpose admirably, but that would take us out of our field; we have to do with man. The only illustration therefore is that state of intellectual torpor into which man sometimes falls and which makes him comparable to the ox, a brother to the ox, soul-quenched, a thing that grieves not and that never hopes. So much for the varying nature of repose. To study its mor- ality is another and a far more difficult thing, and yet it is only after an earnest study of its morality that one is justified in an- swering the question already put: When, where and how long may we pause? It may be dull to pause, but it certainly is not always wrong. To re pose our wearied virtue after exertions is a necessity, to repose in sleep from physical and mental efforts is also a necessity, and though some strenuous minds of old cried out in an excess of ardor: ' ' Deliver us from our necessities, O I ord — they were not delivered therefrom, nor can any mortal hope for such a boon. Dull then and disagreeable as it may be for hungry hearts to pause, pause they must, and taking all in all, they will find that life is a stern mistress requiring almost as much time for rest as she allows for labor. To hearts that are not hungry she may not appear stern in this that she demands so much rest, but in this that she does not allow more. According to the motive, therefore, with which man seeks re- pose, will the morality of his action be determined. But because the moral qualities of an action are more easily grasped from posi- tive elements, we must find something positive in repose. This is easily done; in physical repose there is always some degree of mental activity and indeed, the greater the physical repose, pro- vided it does not approach the absolute, the more intense are the mental activities. So on the other hand in mental repose there will ever be found a degree of physical activity, varying in intensity according to the nature of the repose. In absolute rest alone shall we find an absence of activity. Our motive therefore in seeking physical repose may be and generally is mental activity; our motive