LIFE, unmeasured and unhurried, takes all the time it f seems to need for the development of its animate and inanimate tokens of triumph and travail.
Life is a prodigal sower of the seed that laughs at the harvest, and busies itself with hanging out the stars each night and dusting off the sun for the day.
The life of man is a penny balloon which the wind has blown into the center of things to help celebrate the perpetual snake dance that has neither beginning nor ending.
Andrew Jackson was being piloted toward this earth star hundreds, even thousands, of years before he arrived. Being born, he became, as a poet said, "the omnibus of his ancestors." He was the latest visible emissary to the earth of all that had transpired within his own antecedent line, and much else besides.
Fear, courage, joy and sorrow that he was called upon to confront had never been faced before in the same way that these elements were presented to the baby, the boy, the youth, the man, and the aged one, surfeited with honors, who crept toward the grave in the sweet pastures of his beloved Hermitage and rejoiced that the journey was ended. His multiple problems, age-old and repetitive as they were, were new to the child and to the man that was once a child. That life, and the joys, sorrows, triumphs and defeats that were the embroidery of it, belonged peculiarly and singly to him.
He could not share them with a single soul. His experience would be of no avail to those who might follow his seed, or trek in his trail. For none could be like him, as none is like another. A man's life is an active current that casts both light and shadow between two slumbering poles. Thousands of years have combined to create it. It is electric and dynamic. It is positive and negative. Opposition may cause it to be aggressive, or submissive, or indifferent.
The chemical, cultural, and environmental forces that were compounding in the antecedent line of a man's life before the man arrived very largely determine the sort of creature he will be at the beginning; but as the child grows, the facets of his life, the things he sees, and says, and does, and what others tell him they have seen, and what others do to him, form his own prism. He weaves his web, spider-like, and is the center of his own universe —until Life, relentless and mocking, brushes his little universe out of the crevice of the earth, and spins new gossamer for another tenant.
It is difficult to trace back the direct line of Andrew Jackson in the North of Ireland, but we know that certain forces were at work nearly two hundred years before his birth that would have definite effect upon his life. Though the begetting of human life seems to be haphazard, it also appears that certain races, and certain types of men of those races, have arrived at the time when they were most needed for a specific task affecting the human family. The theory of personal predestination is scarcely tenable, but it is observed, nonetheless, that whenever the advancing races require a task to be done there are men capable of doing it, for weal or for woe, and it does not matter much, except to the distributors of medals and parchments, whether we call them Caesars, Napoleons, Washingtons or Jacksons.
