The Tree of Adventure and the “Root of All Weevil.”

The cheer-germinator demonstrates that the exiguous exorbitancies of economic existence are equivalent to the music of dumbell exercises in a carillon, as compared with the ineradicable effervescence of the ego; for the essence of human existence is persistence.

Elasticity is the spring of man's mental machinery and catapults his consciousness beyond the circumscription of circumstance; unless, of course, his spring has been busted by too many barrages in the siege of Boodle. But life, thanks to human hope and humour, is full of facts figurating that the tree of adventure rises above the “root of all weevil,” and that in the midst of debt man can still put a little life into “living.” For courage is the evaluation of evolution, and the “homo” would have been blotto in half a jiffo had he not pitted his puny but palpable penchants against the atrocities of atrophy. His highest hope has always been his maddest moment. When he soars above the murmuring of Mammon he leaves his monica on the pages of the past. When he moves among the shades of Sharon and emulates the heroic “hobos” of history he robs the improbable of improbability and ticks off timidity. Foolish he may appear to his cozened cousin courting the inglenook in pampered prolixity, but he lives life, even if it kills him.

Why do men defy the ethics of the air in pervious pantechnicons? Why do they risk a permanent change of address in regions with a dark brown taste where necking-parties are carried to excess and only the guest who keeps his head gets away with it? Why does he tickle the ivories in the elephant-haunted quavers and crochets of Pianoforte, put the leopard on the spot, go on a jag with the jaguar, hunt the gorilla when it has its monkey up, and pot the python in the Serpentine? Why do men leave bed and breakfast, hearth and home, work and wages, bath and boodle, tax and “tick,” to mooch through mud, shiver in shorts, offer their bodies as lunch for lepidoptera and enjoy the advantages of being rid of the advantages of Progress? Why?

page 52

Because the call of the wild is the only contemporary call which is not a call to alms. Men brave the wide and free because it is the only freedom free from finance and the terrors of Progress. Hence they risk the unknown knowing that it can't be any worse than the dun known. Whence the tracker, the trekker and the tramper.