FENCES!

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21254, 6 August 1932, Page 6 (Supplement)

FENCES!

MENTAL AND MATERIAL EXCLUSIONS AND INCLUSIONS ! BY AMORT 6TRATTON Fences are both exclusive and inclusive, built to keep in and shut out. The ex , captions, cf course, are the fences used by politicians who from habit, it is said, are able to sit on them without discomfort. Lowell knew all about that:— A kin' o' hangin' round and settin* on a fence Till Providence pinted how to jump an' save the most expense. Most of us divide our world into two parts, separated by a fence. On one side are people we like, or who like what we / like. And with them, as good company for them and for us, we include a host of friendly things, animate and inanimate, such as pet cats, comradely dogs, honest horses, well-loved books and gentle memories. On the other side are people for whom we affect dislike or indifference, or who don't like what we like, and they are cast into the outer void in company with r'l those things and beings on whom we ■ rer our most cherished antipathies. Over fence is out. Dictionaries define fences structures of rails, boards, wooden or tal openwork; a hedge, wall or ditch; . j'f means of de-fence. And it is often ire that our fences are put up on inrvinctively protective impulse. The Fences ol Youth I Youth, despite its traditional generosity of instinct, is the great builder of fences. Exclusion is most large large in its lexicons. Its forthright and downright likes and dislikes know no tempering shades of judgment. Grey is not included in its gamut of colours. Everything is either black or white, and the black is thrust th scant ceremony outside the fence. Vou can build barriers very easily when vou are young. Only time and experience on teach us that men and women are neither wholly black nor wholly white, r.ud bring us to that charity of mind which makes life a sweeter thing for us and a ? L'idlier thing for others. Our fences should he built neither too high nor too close. 'And there should always be a convenient gate so that entry may not be too difficult for those chance wayfarers through whom, often, the good God sends choice gifts of mind and spirit. Material Fences The actual material fences with which we enclose our little household estates are not unlike the fences of the mind. They are more than the legal boundary marks of property designed to ensure regard for the Scriptural warning relative to neighboars landmarks. They reflect our natural desire for a degree of personal privacy, and our craving for a retreat and recess into which we may retire, undisturbed, with the best of life's gifts and the worst of life's troubles. With the best will in the world to be a part of one's kind, my honest British prejudice has never been able to accept the American heresy of ' no fence.' It is good and healthful sometimes to be enclosed alone with flowers and sky and sun and stars and memories and dreams, and to know that one's household fence is a wall that keeps out the world. In such moments one feels like echoing the Pyramus of the immoTtal Bottom: O, sweet and lovely Wall! Thanks, courteous Wall, Jove shield thee well for .this! Fences Time Destroys But ah! These fences of the mind! To perceive what to fence out of this perplexing, fascinating, insistent thing we call daily life, and what to fence in; to discriminate among our acquired or inherited fences which to preserve, adorn and bequeath, and which to demolish; to know when to use our fences for society and when for solitude. We look back along the line of the years and retrospectingly examine the stout and ornate fences we erected in the days of our jubilant and vigorous youth. They are down in a thousand places; their ruins are buried in the charitable growths of kindly flowers and soft mosses. Only here and there has time left them standing, a stout defence against the pessimists, and the blase, the cynical and the worldly-wise, the blunt of soul and the hard of heart. Some day, if ever, when even these last remnants of my own fences have fallen, I shall build a tiny rest-house on the Bpot where they had been highest and Etout-est, ugliest and most forbidding. And over its portals I shall paint in shining and welcoming characters some legend that will bring to its shelter those whom my fences had so long excluded, that at last I may bless them with understanding instead of wounding them with presumptuous judgment.