SELF-CULTIVATION

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 313, 30 September 1926, Page 13

SELF-CULTIVATION

“Find out beauty for yourself, don’t accept other people’s formulas; beauty is, of course, everywhere and triumphant, and insistent; it is only prejudice, repression and fear that blind our eyes to her; repression and fear we have all had to struggle with—repression of what is merely natural and harmful, fear of vague terrors that never will happen; neither repression nor fear is of anv importance in itself, but both eating away our joy of life, our sense of beauty, our emotional happiness,” (writes Marjorie Bowen in the “Teachers’ World.”). “Let us cultivate ourselves, our own tastes, ideas, emotions, intelligence, opinions, first, and then let us cultivate a wide, generous tolerance of everything there is in the world that has the least claim to interest or sincerity; let us preserve the enthusiasm that endeavours to understand before condemning, the mental freshness that will welcome a new point of view, the sense of beauty that is behind everything and shines through everything, and we shall be able even with restricted material opportunities (it is, of course, only material tilings anyone can restrict for anyone else) to enjoy mental and emotional recreation.”