Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

any sense of the innumerability of the human race, even those literatureswhich draw so largely on the Bible, which is indeed the book of the myriad.An individual genius—Dante or Cervantes or Goethe—may grasp it, butit is not in Shakespeare, for a joy in the diversity of souls is not the samething as an awe before the multiplicity of souls. French literature is aboutFrenchmen, though their names be Britannicus and Le Cid; and Frenchmenare not innumerable. For a century, English writers were infatuated with theWest Mediterranean people (they felt them to be splendid and damned), buttheir interest in them did not, to the imagination, increase the population ofEngland or of the Earth. Nor was it increased when Eng-land came to governcolonies in all parts of the globe; those peoples beyond the sea spoke othertongues and many of them were of another color. How many is many, if themany seem to be deplorably immature and incult? The imagination playstricks on those who count souls in condescension.Americans could count and enjoyed counting. They lived undera sense of boundlessness. And every year a greater throng of new facespoured into their harbors, paused, and streamed westward. And each onewas one. To this day, in American thinking, a crowd of ten thousand is nota homogeneous mass of that number, but is one and one and one … up toten thousand.Billions have lived and died, billions will live and die; and this everyAmerican knows—knows in that realm beyond learning, knows in hisbones. American literature of the great age is filled with the grasp of thisdimension; it is in Whitman’s oft-derided catalogs, in Poe’s “Eureka,” inMelville’s resort to myth, in Emily Dickinson’s lyrics. It is not in Thoreauand Emerson, and its absence is all the more conspicuous when they arewriting under the influence of the Sanskrit scriptures, where the realizationabounds.This knowledge is now in every American and in his glance. Andthere as everywhere it never ceases to call into question one’s grasp on one’sown identity.Fortunately for several generations, the American has had the Bible.The Bible, like the Sanskrit scriptures, is one long contemplation of the situationof the one in the innumerable, and it sternly forbids its readers to drawany relief from what lies about them. Its characters hang suspended upon thepromises of the imagination; for generations most Americans were namedafter them. Those (one and one and one …) to whom destiny has extendeda promise and a plan have this consolation that they feel themselves to beirreplaceable. Each one is a bundle of projects.194