American Wisdom: Preface on a Sunday Morning

Lin Yutang was an inventor and prolific author. In the preface to his 1950 masterpiece on American culture, Yutang describes the impetus and the themes of American wisdom and spirituality, through the literary lens of some of America's most celebrated writers:

I lived for over ten years in the United States without daring to write a book about the country. For that matter, even with my almost ten years in Manhattan, I wouldn't dare to write a book about New York, that dark, fathomless, mysterious city. I wouldn't dare to write even about Eighty-fourth Street. I don't know enough about it. It seems a much easier task to write about the spiritual journey through American writing from which I have just returned. I daresay I have never given myself such a wild holiday, with time so liberally and wholeheartedly spent on visiting all the inspiring sights of America's spiritual topography, without a thought of the morrow. I had taken many excursions before and the landscape is not unfamiliar. But I did enjoy visiting more leisurely and at close hand the broad pastures of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the snow-capped peaks of Emerson, the granite monolith of Thoreau, the dark cavern of Edgar Allan Poe, the seven-thousand-foot-high plateau city of Mount Santayana, the laughing valley of Ben Franklin, the awe-inspiring sculptured rocky dome of Lincoln, the Greek edifice of Jefferson.

Returning from such a grand tour, I have put down these notes of a journey, of what I as a Chinese observed, what I think, what I love and what have been my disappointments. I have soliloquized along the way. The point of view is individualistic, and limited, I know, as every personal viewpoint must be. What interests me is to see the American approach to life, noting how some of the great American minds have grappled with the problems of God and life and im mortality, and the toils and struggles and joys of human life, those things which mean so much to me. As William James says, "The most interesting and valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs," the over-beliefs and basic assumptions about God, and religion, and the home, and marriage, and life, and death, and about what constitutes happiness. Thus my quest is a quest for American wisdom about living. There can never be a synthesis of the American philosophy of life; America is so diverse. Yet a general sketch of these vistas of American wisdom may be made, however inadequate and however limited it may be by a personal vision.

A society without a philosophy of life is a frightening thing. Such beliefs, so far as I can see, are in complete rout and confusion today. If we cannot obtain a general agreement as to what the American nation as a whole thinks about such problems, we can at least obtain a view of what some of her best and most perceptive minds thought about them, what their perplexities were, and of what they were assured, convinced. Every nation has its clear visions, its moments of clairvoyance, its honest grapplings with the things real but unseen that lie at the bottom of all the motive forces for our conduct and being. To be spiritually reinstated in some of those beliefs and over-beliefs, one must go back to those who have gone before us and who were able to see life without sentimentality and without illusion. To seek the calm and balanced quality of the thinking of American sages, who present the inner and the outer life of man in some pattern of order and harmony that must be the aim of this quest. In a way, all the important thoughts of any nation should be considered as efforts toward such clarity of relationships.

God save us from the absolutist attitude that we shall know all the truths! Truth we shall never know; it is only clarity we are striving for. A wise man is content if he makes one good guess at truth in three, or if through hard thinking and striving for some general principle, as Justice Holmes did, he finally arrives at an imperfect but tolerably workable formula for living. Perhaps even more important than knowing the truth is the general unsettling of our complacent beliefs and gilt-edged assumptions that must ever mark the beginning of any kind of thinking life. No one begins to think until he has some of that brute complacency thoroughly thrashed out of him with the rawhide of the wiser minds. Humanity constantly drowses, is thrashed, wakes up, and falls to drowsing again. Each generation begins its own thinking this way. We all make a bet on life, not because we like to gamble but because we are already born and have to live through this span of sixty or seventy years and so perforce must bet on some faith or other.

Yet some have made better guesses than others, and great thinkers like Emerson, Franklin, and Santayana are merely those who seem to the majority of us to be the better guessers. The voyage of life is long, and we are all in it, and the passengers all try to guess at the final destination the so-called "end of living." On the horizon stretches an impenetrable mist, and at different ports we put off a few passengers, urging them to come back and tell us what is the port so as to help us in our calculations, and a few promise; but they never return. And so, like the ship Saint Christopher that Santayana tells us about, captained by St. Peter and heading for Mechanopolis and trying to find the blue heaven, we continue to ride the waves, and all the philosophers can tell us is to keep up our pluck. The best of them, however, tell us that the important thing is not to worry about the port of destination but to enjoy the voyage on which we are likely to be a long time and where we are now at any rate, that we make the voyage livable while we go along, "Let us sail for the sake of sailing," cry some of the true sailors. As for seeking the blue heaven, why, it is over our heads all the time (so says Santayana).

I remind myself that there has been some pretty vigorous thinking and writing in the last hundred and seventy years of American national life. American thinking minds have traversed the journey before, have undertaken the quest and explored life s beauties and possibilities again and again. No matter how great they were, in their personal lives they faced the same problems of living as ourselves. The lively correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on religion and philosophy and old age and death seems as fresh today as ever. The Americans have some good ancestors; too bad they don't have ancestor worship. Do they worship their ancestors? I often wonder. It is good to know one has good ancestors; it's a kind of subconscious feeling that makes for strength and pride. None of them is very old, but their past (we can stretch it to three hundred years) still can be admired. I do not mean the killing of the Indians and fighting the Mexicans; I mean that there have been some redoubtable men, hardy, strong, and cheerful, like Jefferson and Franklin, who make some of the moderns, bent on analyzing the foibles of their insides and presenting them as worthy of respect, seem by comparison rather ridiculous.

Who are the great American ancestors? And what is the American spirit? Who knows? A man has a number of ancestors, some creditable and some otherwise. A person who has a pirate sea captain for one of his great-grandfathers and a bluestocking grandmother and a Scotch great-grandmother can have quite a mix-up in his blood. The combination of the sea captain's love of adventure and Scotch prudence can be a terrific thing. Even Jefferson admitted that "as to commerce, indeed, we have strong sensations." Emerson talked about finding "the sources of the Nile" and discovering the "infinitude of the private man." Mark Twain thought of money, Herman Melville laughed at fame, Hawthorne brooded, and Walt Whitman proposed to plant the "brotherly kiss" on everybody, thus establishing a democracy of ambiguous sexuality. But Franklin talked like an American Confucius, with good hard sense yet with wit and imagination, and Oliver Wendell Holmes rambled in his talk like an American Montaigne.

Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again. Before the cock crows thrice we deny Truth again and again.

It will be seen that in writing this book of American wisdom I have relied as much on letters and journals as upon the learned men's published essays. I have definitely shut out formal philosophy. I rather think it should consist of thoughts, intimate rather than formal, presented rather than argued, thoughts somewhat unshaped and plastic, but spontaneous and tender, suggesting tolerance, waywardness, individuality, and a highly personal tone. It should consist of thoughts kodaked, as it were, at the moments of their birth, when the universe or life tickled these writers and produced a tintinnabulation in their brains, no more than that. Such thoughts are sometimes likely to be clairvoyant and lucid, as these same authors thoughts are not when they set out to present an idea to the public and get so involved. It seems that in collecting these spontaneous thoughts I am like a listener at a lecture who watches, not principally for the development of the speaker's scheme, but for the escaped smiles and half-suppressed emotions, and particularly for the moments when the speaker forgets his notes and is carried away into a sudden burst of spontaneous eloquence. I love to see a speaker lose his notes and to overhear, when I can, what he whispers to the chairman.

For my part, I can only promise to be serious, but not solemn, and intimate as far as I dare. Emerson says nobly that the maker of a sentence "launches into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and the old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight." I wish I could feel that way, but very rarely have I that comfort. More often I am like Mrs. Emerson, who gives a new order to her maid in the kitchen and feels like a child who throws a stone and runs away.

One word more. In looking at American as well as at Chinese thought, I have always felt myself a modern, sharing the modern man's problems and pleasures of discovery. Wherever I say "we," I mean "we moderns." I have kept my Oriental background as far as I can, but I have leaned backward not to make comparisons with Chinese analogies since this book is to be about American wisdom. What there is in my whole point of view, in what I have read and absorbed into my being from my Chinese reading, will, I am sure, be reflected in its emphases and preferences and enthusiasms. The Chinese are always enthusiastic (I may say excited) about something, particularly the problems of daily living. You cannot tell them not to be. But I suppose that is all to the good. When Christopher Morley talks about "The Last Pipe" or when David Grayson talks about the binding power of doughnuts, rich, brown, with just a bit of white sugar to set them off, or of a deep, thick, golden-yellow pumpkin pie, baked in a brown crockery plate, and exclaims, "A wonderful pie!" we understand each other. Not faith, hope, and charity, but doughnuts, hot muffins, and pumpkin pies will make the nations united, which is a unity considerably more real than that of the United Nations at present.