Are You Alive? (by: Stuart Chase)

I seem to live when I am creating something – writing this article, for instance; making a sketch, working on an economic theory, building a bookshelf, making a speech.

Art certainly vitalizes me. A good novel, some poems, some pictures, operas, many beautiful buildings and particularly bridges affect me as though I took the artist’s blood into my own veins. There are times, however, when a curtain falls over my perceptions which no artist can penetrate.

The mountains and the sea and the stars – all the old subjects of a thousand poets – renew life in me. As in the case of art, the process is not automatic – I hate the sea sometimes – but by and large, I feel the line of existence below me when I see these things.

Love is life, vital and intense. Very real to me also is the love one bears one’s friends.

I live when I am stipulated by good conversation, good argument. There is a sort of vitality in just dealing in ideas that to me at least is very real.

I live when I am in pleasure of danger – rock-climbing, for example.

I feel very much alive in the presence of a genuine sorrow.

I live when I play – preferably out-of-doors at such things as diving, swimming, skating, skiing, dancing, sometimes driving a motor, sometimes walking.

One lives when one takes food after genuine hunger, or when burying one’s lips in a cool mountain spring after a long climb.

One lives when one sleeps. A sound healthy sleep after a day spent out-of-doors gives one a feeling of a silent, whirring dynamo. In vivid dreams I am convinced one lives.

I live when I laugh – spontaneously and heartily.

In contradiction to “living” I find five main states of “existence” as follows;

I exist when I am doing drudgery of any kind – adding up figures, washing dishes, answering most letters, attending to money matters, reading newspapers, shaving, dressing, riding on street cars or up and down elevators, buying things.

I exist when attending the average social function – a tea, a dinner, listening to dull people talk, discussing the weather.

Eating, drinking, or sleeping when one is already replete, when one’s senses are dulled, are states of existence, not life. For the most part, I exist when I am ill.

Old scenes, old monotonous things – city walls, too familiar streets, houses, room, furniture, clothes – drive one to the existence level. Sheer ugliness, such as one sees in the stockyards or in a city slum, depress me intensely.

I retreat from life when I become angry. I exist through rows and misunderstandings and in the blind alleys of “getting even."