With The Crowd

Some poet has told us to go with the crowd,

     But the crowd is so awfully slow,

It moves like a snail down the town’s wide trail

     Like it had no whither to go.

I never can go with the crowd, ah, no,

     I’ hindered and balked in my plan,

I’ve someone to meet a mile up the street

     A prompt and a businesslike man.

If I go with the crowd I am always behind,

     I can’t crawl along such a pace;

So I take to the street and with hurrying feet

     I win my appointment race.

If you’ve got nowhere to go and nothing to do

     You can go with the crowd all day,

But if you’ve got a date and don’t want to be late,

     The crowd might stand in your way.

March 22 or 23, 1917

This may refer to the following essay by a Dr. Frank A. Crane, who wrote a series of what were titled “Four Minute Essays”:

                                                                                                      We Are All One

What is my boasted independence? I am dependent upon everybody and everything. I go with the crowd. I am caught in the press of men. I must move with them.

What I call my character or nature is made up of infinite particles of inherited tendencies from my ancestors -- those whose blood runs in my veins. A little seed of laziness from this grandfather and of prodigality from that. Some remote grandmother, perhaps, has stamped me with a fear of horses or a love of dogs. There may be in me a bit of outlawry from some pirate forefather, and a dash of piety from one who was a saint.

So everything in me passes on through my children. I am sewn in between ancestry and posterity. I am a drop of water in flowing river, a molecule in a mountain, a cell in a great tree.

My gestures, ways, mannerisms, so-called peculiarities, I borrowed them all.

Religion is not a personal affair so much as it is communal. You are a Jew because you were born a jew: for the same reason you are a Catholic, you are a Presbyterian, you are a Buddhist, you are a Morman. As we enter life we find these cells already made in the human beehive and crawl into them.

Original ideas? Where will you find them? All the ideas there are exist now, floating in the human sea. I, an oyster, absorb a few, and call them mine. Even the phrases of the Lord’s prayer have been traced to Talmudic sources.

How we part ourselves up into strange egotisms! We strut, gesticulate, contend, and talk of me and mine, only to go down at last in a cataract that empties into the unknown.

Let us, therefore, put away coarse egotisms and partisan passions, and learn to love humanity, to think and feel in terms of humanity.