The Day We Throw This All Off

The below passage was written in 1900 by Thomas Fleming Day, editor of Rudder Magazine.

The fire is well burned down, the end of the last log is sticking out of the gray ash, smoking and smoldering like an old love affair, and there is no more fuel in the locker. Let her go out, say I, for I'm sick of this armchair life and want to get outdoors, where a man doesn't have to breathe the same air twice over in order to get a good lung full of oxygen. I'm tired, boys; tired as a dog that has hunted rabbits all day. The only difference the dog runs his quarry to earth, while mine take to the water.

I was just thinking, what's the use of all this---this living, this working, this worrying, this fretting and fussing? Isn't the negro who sits in the shade of the plantain, content that he has a shirt to his back and a meal in his belly, the more sensible fellow? You and I at the end of it will get no more than he will---six feet of mother earth. To the devil with your fifty years of dress shirt existence, trousers with pockets, and houses with doors, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that goes to make up civilization. When are we happiest? The day we throw this all off, and, clad in our worst, play savage on some lonely shore, dragging a meal out of the water as our ancestors did before some misguided idiots invented money, markets, and manners.

Today I have a thousand-fold the knowledge possessed by the most learned and brilliant of the ancients, but am I any happier? Not a bit. You and I are being dragged at the wheels of the thing we call Progress, and those who ride, cry out to join in a song of triumph. For what? Look in your hands. Is what you have succeeded in grasping worth any more than a fistful of yon gray ash in whose crumbling heap the last sparks are flickering and passing away?

--- Thomas Fleming Day, January 1900