Jimville Does Not Know A Great Deal About The Crust Of The
Earth, It Prefers A "Hunch." That Is An Intimation From The Gods
That If You Go Over A Brown Back Of The Hills, By A Dripping
Spring, Up Coso Way, You Will Find What Is Worth While.
I have
never heard that the failure of any particular hunch disproved the
principle.
Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of
personal relation to the supernatural. There is not much
intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you and
the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets in
Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and
drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a
certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all
vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,--it wants the German to coin
a word for that,--no bread-envy, no brother-fervor. Western
writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness
too much upon their tongues, but you have these to witness it is
not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it represents the
courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that it
endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do
beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day
did gods.
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