May 10, 1926
If we always understood, we wouldn't make any mistakes. The story of the human race has always been one of groping and striving. The unknowable. That something which might satify.
Moment by moment, hour by hour, days into years, this reaching, this dreaming, this longing of the mind and heart and soul goes on.
Every step out of ignorance is a step toward God and His world.
Happiness is a relative term, in its last analysis and yet unless there be interests in life that tend to create and build out of that which lies so dormant in our natures, we can know little happiness. We try to act independently. But that is impossible.
Everything we do or think is eternally woven into the endless skein of human throb and feeling. Somebody, somewhere is always affected by what we think or do.
You may this day be storing in your heart that which may not blood for years.
The explorer is always a benefactor. The achievement in itself is trivial to him. It is enough for him to feel that in the doing of his job there may also rest the end.
So it is that we have our expeditions to the ends of the earth. Our pole searchers, and those to whom dark continents and the charted "unexplored" mean only a search for knowledge and a desire to understand.
We are most misjudged by the ignorant by our sincerest searches after true expression and the largest development of our natures. Not being us, they, of course, are unable to travel with us.
What an epitaph for any man: "He strove to understand!"
