No doubt about it. Progress has made massacres upon us. Progress goes ahead to find happiness. That's the trouble with the thing. For the way to happiness is backwards. The way uncles and lobsters are oriented. Lobsters and uncles go ahead backwards. At least, all my uncles did. The Golden Age was a long way to the rear, and they knew it. They turned their broadsides and their rear upholstery towards the dubious future as they advanced and kept their bright eyes on the past. It's the only safe way. Aunts always go frontwards and stick their noses into other people's business. But not uncles. Not I.
Progress goes ahead and destroys the best things, the things that should not change, like love, like cookery, like boys, for instance. I never knew a boy to get better as he filled out his breeches. The more to him, the less poetry, the less boy. It makes me grow philosophical, in a Spinoza-like way, to think of boys growing up into dubious men. So I won't think.
Among the many beautiful things the iron foot of progress crushes are the seasons. It hasn't done enough damage, these last eighty years, in destroying night, for us and the chickens, by electricity. It went right ahead and abolished the seasons. Thanks to quick-freezing, you can now eat asparagus in December and venison on the Fourth of July. They aren't really good asparagus or very tender venison; they taste a lot like plastics, but there they are. Out of season. Out of reason. Our of place. Unholy. In the white months we have greens. New peas for St. Valentine's Day. And there is no more Spring. We don't need it, they say. Because Spring is all the year round, it ceases to matter. It shrivels up and disappears. You can't blame it at all.
Spring was necessary to our bodily and mental economy. It really was. It was the time of love. It was the time of greens. I speak in the past tense, and sadly. It was the time of rejuvenation, All my boyhood love affairs started in the Spring—and usually ended there, I being the kind 'of boy I was. Only once did I break that choral dance of the seasons when I fell violently in love on Washingon's Birthday. It didn't take. And she hit me on the head with a croquet mallet later on, in the Spring, when she should have been tender and admiring of me. Maybe the militancy of Washington's Birthday came out in her that way. Anyway, it was my worst love affair of all, I never fell in love again on either side of Spring. Only just smack in the middle of it.
Green. Color of fairyland. Color of resurrection. Color of life. Only those who live up under the rim of the blue bowl of the Arctic region—as I do—can appreciate what green means. The green half of the year restores us after the white half has brought us low. We turn ourselves and our cows out into a greening world, and we browse and luxuriate. It restoreth our souls. Greens are better than sulphur and molasses as a rejuvenator. Nebuchadnezzar wasn't in his dotage when he took to grass. He was catching his second breath, recovering his lost manhood, or boyhood. He was renewing himself, like the phoenix of Araby, on the green fires of the world. They should have let him graze. He wasn't going foolish. He was growing wise. And I bet I know what danderish greens he was eating to get his dander up. I am coming to them.
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