Judge — May 1937 — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

GOD FORGIVE ME— What if You Are a Success? BY A. D. ROTHMAN LEASE mark that what I am about to say I say very calmly: To hell with Success. And yet I could write no four words with greater reluctance, for basically I have little sympathy with failure. So, with even greater calm I repeat, to hell with Success—we do such muttish things with it. ... It's a fine day in early Spring as I sit and write this, and you might say that any decent nature would be in- spired to loving-kindness by so much sun and blue sky and laughing air as lie outside my windows. I could be, too, weren't it for the embittering knowledge that this same sun and sky and air, the only immortality I am ever likely to know, are being dissipated out of doors while I fret in search of just words to frame a wise theme that most everyone will flatter himself as recognizing at once to be not wise but childish-fool- ish—. D° you remember the comical Ro- manoff of a recent stage-piece who protested that there wasn’t much less that one could ask of life than a hot bath, a good dinner and a pretty woman?—and yet so hard to get! That's the way I feel about Success. It's the hot-bath-good-dinner-pretty-woman of our aspirations, intrinsically as trivial when you get it and just as exasperat- ingly hard to get. Search as I will, I find only few who use Success for any better purpose than improving the quality of the liquor they serve their friends, building themselves bigger swimming pools, or getting a more expensive quality of ermine for their wives’ wraps—or, if they've reached the very top, buying themselves real, sea-going luxury yachts. Now, I've no quarrel with better liquor, bigger swimming pools, finer ermines or more luxury yachts. But isn’t it silly that we should bend our lives to the point of breaking them for nothing more impor- tant than these things, or for that mat- ter even for the possibility of leaving to our fellow citizens after our death a world famous collection of old masters? All that's not good enough; it’s too emp hate to let too serious a feeling creep into this brief piece. 1 had hoped, rather, to maintain throughout the note of petu- lant exasperation with which it was opened, One can be just nicely murder. ous and even amusing under such cir- cumstances. But do what I will I find that the subject is really vital and deserves better from my hand than a pistache May 1937 treatment. Really, now, isn’t Success a very empty thing—even for that sadly select group of 1/10 of 1 percent who, my force of statisticians informs me, are all that achieve it anyway? ON'T tell me, I know, I know: It isn’t the ermines or the yachts that are the important things in Success. I know what Success means to even the boldest natures:—the sense of achieve- ment, the large and difficult task well done, the attainment of high place. Yet, I've got you there. All right, after achievement, after the big job is done, even after you sit in high place, what then? Is it the urge to dominate others that you seek to satisfy, power in busi- ness or power in politics that you strive to obtain? In either case you are in the hands of impostors. What sham and hypocrisy are practised to obtain and maintain power! To what ends is power almost always directed! Complete the homily for yourself, and the lesson 1s plain enough. In the scramble to achieve, win and acquire we scorn the very qualities in living which ostensibly we are striving insanely to have time and opportunity for. The next occasion on which I hear anybody say that he hasn’t time to read, I'm going to laugh in his face or stick a finger into his eyeball, preferably the latter, for laughing in the face breaks no bones. The next time I meet one of our upper-bracket-income chaps who has never been able to take off that day in spring when he is sure to find the first hepatica in the woods, I'm going to in. vite him to the clyster and liven that colon of his which he has deadened with the eating of endless public din. ners, I ‘OR, my dear friends, does not the true secret of Success lie in the search for the first hepatica of spring or the first cardinal flower of summer? Or perhaps for you, lucky devil, it lies in applewood fires on the grate in late October, or the moments of utter calm that you seek for yourself all alone in an armchair in your study in the depth of winter? For me, of course, Success lies in the sun and blue sky and laughing air just outside my window as I write— God forgive me! "Now to invent something!” comicbooks.com