A Failure at Fifty (1940)

Carey Wilson: Narrator

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  Narrator : Night shift - men wanted, and they're taking 'em on at the rate of one every minute. It can't be long now, there's work ahead! Work, and pay, and food, and a bed...

  [focusing in on one low-spirited man] 

  Narrator : but not for all. No more jobs open now, and the eternal fog of hopelessness chills your heart again. For you, my friend, are fifty years old and you're broke, friendless, jobless, down and out. You wonder if this can really be you - this worn and hungry man. Can it be the same you who at eighteen on a high school platform valiantly cried out 'Beyond the Alps lies Italy!'; the same you who kissed a lovely laughing girl in a moon drenched canoe on this very lake? Yes, the lake remains even if the lovely laughing girl is gone forever - gone with all else of dream and reality: all gone save you and the lake, and you're a failure at fifty.

  [despondently contemplating suicide] 

  Narrator : The lake, why not? Tomorrow can be nothing more than a thrice bitter today. The water is cold, but no colder than the world has been to you, and the lake stretches forth a promise of forgetfulness... the lake.

  [a hand grasps his shoulder] 

  Narrator : You might have known that someone would see you, but no matter; the lake will still be there in another hour and the stranger will not. 'No,' you hear yourself saying, 'I wasn't going to jump in mister.' But to make good your pretense, you'll have to listen - silly as may sound any talk to dissuade you. What is the stranger saying? Listen. Yes, listen my friend while I tell you a story...

• [last lines] 

  Narrator : My friend, I have told you this story of Abraham Lincoln because it is a universal promise that none of us shall have lived in vain. Well, that makes ya think, doesn't it. If Abraham Lincoln was a failure at fifty, it makes you willing to live, anxious to live; and you might at least thank the stranger, but where is the stranger? He was here a moment ago and yet, was he? Or, tired and hungry as you are, did you doze a little: sleep and dream a bit? Or, perhaps, was the ethereal stranger the deathless spirit of a great nobility that, on this particular day, chose to devote its immortality to an earthly mission - a mission so typical of its mortal form? Could this have been the momentary reincarnation of another failure at fifty, who always made himself live on, who struggled and suffered and kept going through the dark thirty years of failure with the philosophy that enabled him to say 'God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them'?