019 The Test of Truth

 

“The function of man is to live, not to exist.” – Jack London

Jack London “…had a mental craving for the truth. He applied one test to religion, to economics, to everything. ‘What is the truth?’ ‘What is just?’ It was with these questions that he confronted the baffling enigma of life.”

W. B. Hargrave from The Book of Jack London by Chairman London, 1921, (republished in Manvotionals from the Art of Manliness)

In this episode, we apply Jack London’s question to the ‘baffling enigma of life’ and see what we get. Let me know what you think.

“I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.” – James A. Garfield

“One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The fool in his ignorant bondage

May sneer at their fashion and speech,

The fop and the feather-bed workman

Make mock of the lesson they teach.

The demagogues rant in the market

Of things high removed from their ken:

What are words — empty words — in the balance

With the deeds of the manly men?

They are vertebrate, keen, and courageous,

These toilers, who raise the refrain;

Their work swept away by disaster —

Undaunted, they build it again.

Yet ye fawn on your quacks and your idols,

Your dreamers and mountebanks — then,

When your country is suffering shipwreck,

You’ll fall back on the manly men.”

— from The Song of the Manly Men by Frank Hudson (from The Song of the Manly Men and Other Verses, 1908)