Now I have told you [George wrote to Fox] some of the things that have happened to me and the effect they had upon me. But what has all of this to do with you? — you may ask. I am coming to that now.

In the beginning I spoke about my “philosophy of life” when I was a student in college twenty years ago. I didn’t tell you what it was because I don’t think I really had one then. I’m not sure I have one now. But I think it is interesting and important that I should have thought I had one at the age of seventeen, and that people still talk about “a philosophy of life” as though it were a concrete object that you could pick up and handle and take the weight and dimensions of. Just recently I was asked to contribute to a book called Modern–Day Philosophies. I tried to write something for it but gave it up, because I was unwilling and unready to say that I had a “modern-day philosophy”. And the reason that I was unwilling and unready was not that I felt confusion and doubt about what I think and now believe, but that I felt confusion and doubt about saying it in formalistic and final terms.

That was what was wrong with most of us at Pine Rock College twenty years ago. We had a “concept” about Truth and Beauty and Love and Reality — and that hardened our ideas about what all these words stood for. After that, we had no doubt about them — or, at any rate, could not admit that we did. This was wrong, because the essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man–Alive, and his “philosophy” must grow, must flow, with him. When it does not, we have — do we not? — the Unfixed Man, the Eternal Trifler, the Ape of Fashion — the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow — and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.

I cannot attempt, therefore, to define for you your own “philosophy”— for to define so is to delimit the “closed” and academic man, and you, thank God, are not of that ilk. And to define so would be to call upon me once again your own and curious scorn, your sudden half-amused contemptuousness. For how could anyone pin down neatly the essence of your New Englandness — so sensitively proud, so shy, so shrinking and alone, but at bottom, as I think, so unafraid?

I shall not define you, then, dear Fox. But I may state, may I not? I may say how “it seems to me”? — how Fox appears? — and what I think of it?

Well, first of all, Fox seems to me to be Ecclesiasticus. I think that this is fair, and, insofar as definition goes, I think you will agree. Do you know of any definition that could possibly go further? I do not. In thirty-seven years of thinking, feeling, dreaming, working, striving, voyaging, and devouring, I have come across no other that could fit you half so well. Perhaps something has been written, painted, sung, or spoken in the world that would define you better: if it has, I have not seen it; and if I did see it, then I should feel like one who came upon a Sistine Chapel greater than the first, which no man living yet has heard about.

So far as I can see from nine years of observing you, yours is the way of life, the way of thought, of feeling, and of acting, of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. I know of no better way. For of all that I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth — and also earth’s highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could only say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.

And I should say that it expresses your own position as perfectly as anything could. I have read it over many times each year, and I do not know of a single word or stanza in it with which you would not instantly agree.

You would agree — to quote just a few precepts which come to mind from that noble book — that a good name is better than precious ointment; and I think you would also agree that the day of death is better than the day of one’s birth. You would agree with the great Preacher that all things are full of labour; that man cannot utter it; that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. I know you would agree also that the thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that that which is done, is that which shall be done: and that there is no new thing under the sun. You would agree that it is vexation of spirit to give one’s heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I know you would agree — for you have so admonished me many times — that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.” You would agree with him in that; but you would also agree with him that the fool foldeth his hands together and eateth his own flesh. You would agree with all your being that “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Is this abridgement and this definition just, dear Fox? Yes, for I have seen every syllable of it in you a thousand times. I have learned every accent of it from yourself. You said one time, when I had spoken of you in the dedication of a book, that what I had written would be your epitaph. You were mistaken. Your epitaph was written many centuries ago: Ecclesiastes is your epitaph. Your portrait had been drawn already in the portrait the great Preacher had given of himself. You are he, his words are yours so perfectly that if he had never lived or uttered them, all of him, all of his great and noble Sermon, could have been derived afresh from you.

If I could, therefore, define your own philosophy — and his — I think I should define it as the philosophy of a hopeful fatalism. Both of you are in the essence pessimists, but both of you are also pessimists with hope. From both of you I learned much, many true and hopeful things. I learned, first of all, that one must work, that one must do what work he can, as well and ably as he can, and that it is only the fool who repines and longs for what is vanished, for what might have been but is not. I learned from both of you the stein lesson of acceptance: to acknowledge the tragic underweft of life into which man is born, through which he must live, out of which he must die. I learned from both of you to accept that essential fact without complaint, but, having accepted it, to try to do what was before me, what I could do, with all my might.

And, curiously — for here comes in the strange, hard paradox of our twin polarity — it was just here, I think, where I was so much and so essentially in confirmation with you, that I began to disagree. I think almost that I could say to you: “I believe in everything you say, but I do not agree with you”— and so state the root of our whole trouble, the mystery of our eventual cleavage and our final severance. The little tongues will wag — have wagged, I understand, already — will propose a thousand quick and ready explanations (as they have)— but really, Fox, the root of the whole thing is here.

In one of the few letters that you ever wrote to me — a wonderful and moving one just recently — you said:

“I know that you are going now. I always knew that it would happen. I will not try to stop you, for it had to be. And yet, the strange thing is, the hard thing is, I have never known another man with whom I was so profoundly in agreement on all essential things.”

And that is the strange, hard thing, and wonderful and mysterious; for, in a way the little clacking tongues can never know about, it is completely true. Still, there is our strange paradox: it seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South — so much in balance, in agreement — and yet, dear Fox, th............