12 Living in Revolution
ness of man. They should rather be congratulated. Since the
last war it has been dawning upon them like a revelation
that we were not as good as we thought we were, and are
not now all that we like to think we are, and never will be
in this life as good as we ought to be. Even picking flaws in
our idealized ancestors (though a bit on the mean side
since the dead cannot defend themselves) is a healthy sign
provided their descendants remember the old adage that
we should beware of looking for specks in another man’s
eye while we carry a telephone pole in our own. The best
antidote for the cynic who scorns his fellow men is the plain
admission that nobody can be all right—not excepting him-
self.
Likewise it must be affirmed that nobody is all wrong,
though this is hard to prove with those we dislike. For
much that is good in persons can only be discovered as we
befriend them, and, being real friends with so few in this
impersonal age of machines and remote relations, there is
no way of telling how much is fine in most of us.
Life would be so simple if some of us were either all
false or all true. What bothers us is the fact that we are
both right and wrong at the same time.
One of our humorists once drew a picture of a ski slope
with the double tracks of a man’s skis running straight down
the hill toward a tree. Instead of swerving to one side as
you might expect, one track goes one side of the tree, one
the other, both coming neatly together again and running
to the bottom of the picture where the man is proceeding
as nicely as you please. No caption explains how the feat
was accomplished, and the imagination is left boggling with
the problem of taking two alternatives at the same time.
One cannot do that in skiing without serious consequences,
but life is like that. The clean-cut “either or” is a rare
thing; the baffling mixture “both and” is built into the very