Chapter 2

LIFE’S LANDMARKS

DRIVING along the highway, a motorist carefully notes the  milestones as he passes them; but it is not the milestones that rush pleasantly back upon his memory when he holds his journey in review. After all, the milestones are not particularly picturesque and they are so meticulously equidistant as to become monotonous. But the old man kangaroo that squatted beside the giant-gum where the roads forked; the pair of wise old owls that perched upon the slanting fingerpost; the kookaburras laughing their heads off on the telegraph wire; the golden-haired little girl in red who, on a pony that was obviously enjoying the fun as much as his happy young rider, was galloping home from school; these are the things that he loves to recall when all thought of the stolid mile-stones has faded from his mind.

Civilization passed a notable milestone on the day on which European sailors caught the first glimpse of the American coastline; on the day on which Paradise Lost was published; on the day on which the first message was electrically flashed from continent to continent; on the day on which the first surgical operation was painlessly performed. History has proudly inscribed these epoch-making dates on indelible record. They deserve to be noted, as the milestones deserve to be noted.

But what of the day on which the imagination of Columbus was first fired by the thought of his stupendous enterprise? Of the day on which Milton conceived the idea of a massive epic concerning a war among archangels? Of the day on which the significance of dots and dashes first occurred to Samuel Morse? Of the day on which James Simpson first dreamed of putting his patients to sleep whilst he applied the knife? These are history’s most notable though invisible milestones.

In much the same way, the pilgrimage of every man is punctuated by events and experiences that, figuring in no official register, stand out in his memory as the most vital and formative happenings of his career. Our real red-letter days are seldom the days that we celebrate with feasts and frolics; they are the days of which the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths takes no cognisance. The day on which a happy young couple realize that they are soon to become parents at least rivals in emotional intensity and excitement the day on which the child is eventually born; yet, whilst the State very properly insists that the latter event must be formally and promptly and indelibly registered, the date of the romantic discovery that caused such delighted perturbation is allowed to sink into oblivion.

We make much of wedding anniversaries, silver weddings, golden weddings, diamond weddings and the like, and nobody is likely to quarrel with the amiable and time-honoured customs. But Charles Kingsley observed the sixth of July as the great day of his year. It was the day on which he first beheld his wife’s face. That, he used to say, was his real wedding-day. Richard Jefferies, who, from boyhood, loved every living thing so much that he hated to pull the trigger of his gun, tells how this realm of beauty was still further enhanced for him when he looked upon the lady who afterwards became his wife. He spends whole pages in describing the richer colour of the flowers, the deeper blue of the sky and the way in which the very earth seemed to be enamelled beneath her feet. Yet such days figure in no official register.

The phenomenon has its spiritual counterpart. Life holds no two experiences more alike as to their intrinsic nature, as to the emotions they awaken, and as to their effects on personal character than the experience known as falling in love and the experience known as conversion. When Dante describes the impact on his whole being of his love for Beatrice, he entitles the passage Vita Nuova, the ‘New Life’. Such milestones, whether emotional or spiritual, are invisible; but they are the milestones that matter most.

Dr. F. W. Boreham