"I Have Been Wading in a Long River and My Feet Are Wet"

SINCE coming across that quote of Sherwood Anderson's years ago in a now-forgotten context, I've been wont to use it when feeling like the slow march of survival is taking more and more time away from the things in life that matter. The quote became lodged in my thoughts early this morning as I was updating my All About Jazz profile page, and I hit up Google to see who else was mentioning it and why. Sixteen hits, two of which are from said profile page. But it did bring me to the author's essay "When I Left Business for Literature," which I'd previously only read in excerpted bits and pieces like this one:

[I]n America things are somewhat different. Here something went wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the outlawed brave, foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! we did get ourselves into a bad hole! We were going to be superhuman, and it turned out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all. You cannot blame us that we were somewhat reluctant about finding out the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come down off the perch!

We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting ourselves to laugh occasionally at ourselves for our pretensions; but there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this American business, the land for the free and the home for the brave. We actually meant it, and no one will ever understand present-day America or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we were building all of our big, ugly, hurriedly thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the Cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.

The full essay is available here.