Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1932-12-06
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

| lector and Of his collections are a part
of the happy whole, due to the fact
that appreciation of rightness Is in
variably whetted by wrongness.
The discovery Of the faults and fail
ures of any subject, and their correction,
or cure, If that may be, constitute the
very part of an enthusiasm which is
enjoyed the most by many persons.
Can it be that all this trouble is the
best part, the most desirable portion, Of
a hobby?
Can it be that failure and its cor
rection, If possible, are the true tests
Of life?
Or that acceptance, If correction is
not possible, is the necessary thing, and
with a good heart; and if the heart
does not find it good, that the heart
needs correcting, too?
| While there may come times, in COL
| Letting, when hurry Is the essence of
the SCI cme, in the main a delightful
slownes3 is the best part of it all.
Lack of pressure, in human sense,
is one of the finest features of riding
hobby of any sort.
Here every man is his own master,
at least.
| He does what he pleases, or he does
not do it, just as he pleaSes.
| And often enough his favorite recre-
alton is about the only affair in which
a modern individual may act with such
| freedom.
He is held back everywhere else by
visible and invisible bonds, many of
them running back through the ages,
| but when it comes to his stamp col
lections, or his tropical fish, or his golf,
or his tennis, or his beetles, or his old
! prints, he Is his own man, subject only
| IN hi docirnc hiC fOnknfhNnly nd
| the natural restraints and limitations
of his hobby.
The theory of liberty and freedom
becomes an actually in the small world
| of the collector.
Every man is born free and equal
| here, indeed.
The little world he explores Is nearer
comprehension, in its several features
than the blindingly vast system of
things called Nature.
He can discover something or other
here, no matter how often it has been
explored in the past. This will come
about. in part, because Of the inability
of some human beings to admit the
truth when they find it. if that truth
does not square with their preconceived
notion of things.
It Is amazing how many notions men
build up, then how persistently they
work to support their preconceptions
no matter how much st variance they
find the facts.
How many persons do you know
whom you have ever heard admit they
were wrong about anything?
Two sentences one seldom hears:
| II do not know" and
81 was wrong about that"
You can't blame people much, at that
, Nobody likes to feel he does not know
or is wrong, and especially that others
know he does not know, and know he
is wrong. Mostly it is a case of what
the Orientals call Saving the face
The majority Of human beings are
more concerned with saving their
| faces-to therselves-than with being
right or wrong.
The reason why every enthusiast, nc
matter what his hobby, has a chance
to discover something new, something
useful, something right, is that men
with manufactured notions fail to ex-
pertinent with open eyes and minds
simply because they do not choose to
run the possibility of finding themselves
| in error
The man who delights in discovering
himself wrong, and who is willing to
admit that the joke is on him, even II
he has to admit it to others, will get
the greatest possible "kick" out of his
hobby, because he will have the salts
faction of the scientist as well as the
rightness of the moraliSt He will be
travelling hopefully the right road.