Slaves Of Their Quest

As we have just seen, no man can escape from the limits imposed by his own heredity: he cannot do more than he has the capacity to do, nor in the long run act contrary to his nature. A hack horse cannot win a race, nor can a race horse be made safe for grandma to drive to town. Neither, if a man is to enjoy any social life at all, can he escape the give-and-take and the acceptance of obligations that life with his fellows imposes.

It must be pointed out, too, that freedom in any true and deep sense is something that very few men can know. Only those rare souls who have won an inner transcendence over outer circumstances are truly free, only saints and seers and real philosophers. And these have commonly felt themselves to be free at all times, and in all places, and even (incredible as it may seem) under all circumstances. Thoreau knew himself free in jail. And there have been souls who have given evidence of their essential freedom even amidst the flames that were consuming their bodies. 

Yet even these are not free to do or not to do, after the fancy of the ordinary prater about liberty. Without raising the question of the freedom of the will, we must remind ourselves that it is precisely men of the loftiest spirit and supreme creative powers who are least “free to do what they feel like.” For them, life has no meaning and grows stale in their mouths, except as they live for something, something rare and lofty and beyond themselves. Their bent, their mission, their destiny, their need to lift the life of mankind, is the sternest, most exacting and unrelenting master, and gives them the most straitened, narrowest, and steepest path to follow—in an inner sense (it might even be said) under pain of death. They are the slaves of their quest. Yet—such is their nature, so beyond the understanding of the ordinary man—they would not have it otherwise. Inwardly, day and night, they are on their knees before their vision of the truth or beauty that drives them on.

Theirs, as I conceive it, is the only real liberty—the liberty of the man who is most completely possessed by what he is. And they wait on no man and on no government to give it to them. They win it. They take it. And no man, nor all men put together, can take it away from them.

-excerpted from “Which Way Western Man” by William Gayley Simpson