The Reader's Digest twentieth anniversary anthology [antikvár]

Are ^u Alive? Condensed from The Nation Stuart Chase There seems to be an ascending scale of values in life, and somewhere in this scale there is a line—probably a blurred one—below which one more or less "exists" and above which one more or less "lives." I have often been perplexed by people who talk about "life." Americans, they tell me, do not know how to live, but the French— ah, the French—or the Hungarians, or the Poles, or the Patagonians. When I ask them what they mean by life they do not advance me an inch in my quest of the definition of life. What does it mean to be alive, to live intensely? What do social prophets mean when they promise a new order of life? Obviously they cannot mean a new quality of life never before enjoyed by anyone, but rather an extension of vitality for the masses of mankind in those qualities of "life" which have hitherto been enjoyed only by a few individuals normally, or by large numbers of individuals rarely. What is it which is enjoyed, and how is it to be shared more extensively? Can we hold life on a point for a moment while we examine it? What, concretely, is this "awareness," this "well-being?" I want in a rather personal way to tell you the facts as I have found them. I want to tell you when I think I live in contradistinction to when I think I "exist." I want to make life very definite in terms of my own experience, for in matters of this nature about the only source of data one has is oneself. I do not know what life means to other people but I do know what it means to me, and I have worked out a method of measuring it. I get out of bed in the morning, gulp coffee and headlines, demand to know where my raincoat is, start for the office—and so forth. These are the crude data. Take the days as they come, put a plus beside the Selected from September 1922 issue of The Reader's Digest 5