SAND BUILDERS

Evening Star, Issue 20996, 9 January 1932, Page 2

SAND BUILDERS

The great sand builders are the children. In this holiday season young and old alike hear and obey the call, .“Come unto these yellow sands.” The children carry their wooden spades and buckets. The origin of these goes back | to immemorial times. It is lost in the | mists of antiquity. Sand possesses a strange magic for children. It is magical enough even for grown-up children if they were to think about it. How many, for instance, could tell j ,why the grains are round . and how (they became so? No two particles are I of the same size, shape, or colour. . They are moulded into form by being ■ swirled about in seas or rivers or by the winds. A French geologist says it would require 3,000 years of travel to get the corners rubbed off a grain. 'And an English one computes “that it would take 800 hours of rolling in water at four miles an hour to produce a round from an angular grain of sand. The present writer has sailed several times up and down the gigantic St. Lawrence River, One would fancy from the rage of its huge volumes of water, on which big steamers rock like a cork, that nothing could stand before it. And yet it is largely sound and fury. He was astonished to learn that it cannot excavate a bed for itself. And the reason is—of all things in the world—lack of sand. A great river must carry, it seems, incalculable grains of sand. They are the masons of the river. They do the cutting and carving. But the St. Lawrence issues so pure from its source, so free, comparatively, from sand and grit, that for all the energy of its water's nothing happens. The riverbed remains shallow. If it were onequarter as strong, but twico as sandy, its course would be half as deep again. So mighty are insignificant things in the massl • '• • • But it is of the charm of sand for children that we are thinking just at the moment. Nothing gives them such pleasure. There is the loose, dry sand and the wet. It is the latter that carries the chief charm, for them. And this because it lends itself best to the great game of architecture. What buildings and plannings and constructions they erect upon it. What rocks and caves and castles, churches, docks, and railways, what scooping and tunnelling and trenching and excavations go on 1 And all to be levelled out by the incoming tide.. Yet the heroic imagination of childhood seems to prefer ' to build dangerously rather than in the safe, quiet spaces where the remorseless waves do not reach. There is wise foresight in this, too. For if all their works were to stand and be found the same to-morrow their labour would lose most of its charm. So the ruthless incoming tide is a blessing in disguise. It sweeps their achievements away. It tidies up the beach, washes out the remembrance of their footprints and fortresses, and gives them a clean page to start upon to-morrow. And this they will be prepared to do with the dauntlessness of youth. We suppose the charm of all this amusement derives, in some degree any way, from heredity. It is a kind of what scientific people call reversion to type. It runs away hack through the tissues of memory to the habits of ancestors who wandered and lay and delved in its wide wastes centuries ago. This, we suppose, would also explain something of the delight which even grown-up people enjoy in getting off their boots and turning the soles of their feet to the cool wet sands. But, perhaps, the fuller explanation lies in the fact that the sand supplies the best of mediums for the exercise of the creative faculty inherent in us all. A strange thing is this. Humans only possess it. The bird builds its nest and the bee its cells just as they did millenniums ago. But man does not. He is constantly contriving new ways of doing old things. He is ever pulling down and erecting different construction! upon the ruins. And it begins with the child. The child finds in the sand one of the best mediums for indulging the joy of creation. « * • • When this joy cannot find its ex-' pression there it seeks it out elsewhere. We have all heard of mud pies, and perhaps Lave joined in the making of them. When sand is not available, dust or dirt will serve the same purpose. “What are yoa doing there?” said a man to a little boy, zealously engaged in manipulating gutters to his purpose. "I am building a church,” was the reply. “Here are the steps. Here is the door. Here is the spire. Here is the pulpit.” “And where is the preacher?” asked the spectator. “I hae no muck enough for him,” was the reply. Still more suggestive was the reply of another child to a similar inquiry. When asked what ho was doing, ho said: “I’m building a house for the sun to live in.” Is not that or ought not that to be the main business of life? We are all builders. The

thought and its significance are worked out suggestively by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his wonderful sonnet sequence, entitled ‘The House of Life.’ He shows with great subtlety and music in a hundred and one sonnets how we are fashioning this building; how every work, every idle moment, and every least thing are contributing to build the house of life. It is a very old imagery this of life as a building. But its truth does not grow less impressive with the years. Nor can we greatly improve upon the boy’s answer as expressive of its motive and goal; a house for the sun to live in. In these days of developing architecture the main business is to so choose sites and erect houses that the sun will get at them, and into them, all the hours of the day. We have no end of homilies on the need of this, on the health value of the sun’s light. It were well if similar care were taken to build the house of life so that it might absorb and radiato light. As Milton says in ‘Comus’; He that hath light within his own clear breast . May sit i’ the centre and enjoy bright day. But he that hides a dark and foul thought, Benighted, walks under the midday sun, Himself his own dungeon. History and experience verify that. And it is disquieting to think how careful we may be about getting the sun into our houses and how indifferent about having the proper lighting of the house of life. “ The city not set on a hill,” says Ruskin, “the candle that giveth light to none in the house—these are the heaviest mysteries of this strange world, and it seems to me those which mark its curse the most.” * * * * One other story relating to this young sand builder may point a moral for us. It is a wise provision for cities that are not near a sea beach to provide sand piles for the children. In a certain city a thoughtful woman had a load of clean, white sand brought from the sea shore and pul in tlie yard for her children to play in it. And play they did the live long summer. They built a town, streets, alleyways, garages, factories, tunnels, train lines, and what not. It was as nearly a complete city as one could build in a sand pile. But, says the writer who tells the story, there were two things lacking—a church and a schoolhouse. The mother wondered at the reason for this; for, unlike most boys, they rather liked going to school and church. So she asked: “ Why have you not a school? ” “ Because it is holiday time,” they replied. “ Why don’t you have a church amid your other buildings?” “Because we don’t play in the sand pile on Sundays.” That story also has its farreaching suggestiveness, as, indeed, have even the simplest and silliest things if we have but skill to see them. The implications of the foregoingsome of them, at least—are not difficult to discover. * * • * The children were only building for immediate needs. They were leaving out of their ideal city and life the things that most people would consider the most important. And here again the child is father to the man. Is it not the mistake that we are all in danger of committing? In building tbe house of life we build only for what we regard as practical—what we can use all the time and right away. The more ideal elements are omitted from the structure. And we see the same failure in civic life as well as individual. This is the cause of the slums that disgrace most even of our modern cities. Those who planned them considered only immediate needs. They didn’t build for all the week and all the year round. They forgot about the future. And now their successors have to pay the consequences in diseases of body and soul and increased taxation. So it is every way uneconomic to build the house of life for only immediate needs. • • « « Well, we are all builders. We begin with sand, and end in being buried in it at last. But there are many intermediate stages, many flittings out of one house into another. And the final moral of it all has never been more beautifully put than 'in 1 The Chambered Nautilus.’ In the opening verses Holmes tells how the frail creature builds its shell—its house; how year by year, As the spiral, grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door. Stretched in its new-found home, and knew the old no more. . . . Build tnee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length are free, Leaving thine outworn shell by life’s unresting sea.