I have kept a little known piece of literature written by Edna St. Vincent Millay because it shows her view of another war, WWII. This message to American civilians was written for The Spokesman Review’s February 6, 1943 edition. It appeared on page two. These were her thoughts from over 60 years ago. Words to live by today.
Nothing…If Not Enough
A great American poet’s message to civilians
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
The room is growing dark, it is too dark to write.
I put down my notebook, and draw the curtains over the windows of the living room, looking out for a moment at the snowy hills, lovely in the deepening dusk.
Then I light the candles.
And as I light the candles, I smile. I am suddenly happy. But I do not at all know why. The lighted candles in their branching candlesticks, one at either end of the mantelpiece above the smoldering logs in the big open fireplace—how charming they look! Is it that which makes me so happy? No, it is not that. I lay some small birch logs upon the fire. The bark crackles. The smoke pulls up, smelling sweet. Then the thin flames appear between the logs and all at once the fire is burning briskly. Is it that?
No, it is not that. But, as I take up my notebook again and sit down, prepared to go to work, in the feeble light thrown waveringly across the page by the two candles on the table beside my chair, I know what it is. Forty gallons of gasoline a week, it takes, to feed the engine which makes the electric light for this house! And that gasoline is tonight on its way to the northern coast of Africa! Suddenly my two candles give so strong a light that for one silly, happy moment I am tempted to extinguish one of them and write by the light of one candle alone.
But I do not do this. A thought comes into my mind, and sits down heavily there, crushing at once my foolish exuberance. “How many people in this world today are forced to go without not merely a few of the conveniences of life, but the actual necessities of life—food, shelter, a handful of coal to keep them from freezing? And how many people, as if their hunger and cold were not enough to bear, must bear also the bitter knowledge that by their terrible deprivations they are not helping their country at all, but on the contrary are giving strength and comfort to the hated enemy which reduced them to the wretched creatures that they are?
“And you!—you who find pleasure in the fact that by a small inconvenience to yourself you are helping, if only to an extent no greater than the millionth part of a mustard seed, your own hard-pressed country and her brave allies—what are you thinking of, that you do no more for your country than you do? What a privilege is yours!—to be deprived of conveniences, comforts, even some of the things that you would have called necessities—in order to help the democratic nations win this war, and at the same time make yourself a happier person than you have been for years!
“That is true,” I think. It is true not only of me, but of hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens as well. We love our country. We love that Liberty, whose clean fresh air, with the very first breath we drew, came rushing into our lungs. That Liberty, whose clean, fresh air we have been breathing all our lives. That Liberty, for the lack of whose pure, uncontaminated air we should all, I honestly believe, in a short time suffocate. And we know that our Liberty is threatened. And we know that once it is taken away, there will be nothing that we can do about it, nothing at all—nothing but sit quietly waiting, staring at each other in patient, helpless horror, breathing carbon dioxide till we die.
And what do we do to prevent this from happening? Nothing. For we are not doing enough. And in a struggle for life, such as this is, not to have done enough will be in the end the same as to have done nothing. “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” Why have these words taken from a speech of a great American patriot and orator of many years ago, been singled out from the rest of the speech, been remembered all down the years, by the American people? Because it is the heart’s utterance and earnest cry of the American people itself!
And yet—seeing Liberty, which to us is almost identical with Life, so gravely threatened, what do we do to defend it, to make it secure, not only for ourselves, but for our children and for the generations to follow? As I said nothing. Because we do not do enough.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”—that is another phrase remembered. But we in this country, secure in the certainty that Liberty is merely a part of Life, and inseparable from it, for we have never lived in a world in which this was not true—give all our attention and most of our strength as well to “The Pursuit of Happiness.”
Why should we not? Why should we not “pursue Happiness”? No reason. Only that we must look so fantastic at madly pursuing happiness, and all running in the wrong direction!
It is the Pursuit of Gaiety, not the Pursuit of Happiness, which occupies our time. When our personal, or household duties are done, when our business at the office is over for the day—then off we go in the pursuit of happiness, all running madly in the wrong direction! Fantastic spectacle. Cocktails, dinners, theater, supper, dancing—everything to try to keep from thinking of the war!—when our only real happiness is so close beside us, thinking of the war, not trying to shut it from our minds, thinking of it, and trying to think constructively about it. In this alone today our true happiness lies—we who truly love Democracy. We shall find little real happiness in any other direction, until we have won this war.
Maybe it’s time we all rethought our priorities as far as our country goes. Patriotism ought to be a prerequisite for being an American. Ask any person from another country how much it means to them to be sworn in as an American. Edna was certainly a patriot, that’s for sure.
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