Somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead

In Booth Tarkington’s 1927 novel The Plutocrat, Laurence Ogle, a young playwright, undertakes a North African tour where he keeps running across Mr Tinker, the plutocrat of the title. In spite of Tinker’s wealth and partly because of it, Ogle initially looks down on him as loud, rich, brash and shallow.

Yet eventually Ogle comes to realise that Tinker is the better man, honest, generous and far more in touch with the real world than Ogle has ever been and ever could be. Eventually Ogle asks himself –


Was this inept creature, this childishly loose, childishly tricky creature, this over-lavish, careless, bragging, noisy, money-getting and money-worshipping creature a “new Roman?”


Here, Tinker explains his homespun philosophy to John Edwards, the tour courier.

“Well, to-day we’re here and we’ve got our chance; and the one single and only thing in the universe that’s plain, John Edwards, it’s this.” Here he became solemnly emphatic, and put his heavy hand upon the courier’s shoulder. “The somewhere we’re goin’ to, and got to go to if we don’t want to get wiped out, it’s somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead! It’s like to-morrow; when we get there we aren’t there; we got to keep goin’, and we got to everlastingly and eternally keep goin’ — and goin’ fast! If we don’t, the Almighty hasn’t got a bit o’ use for us; He turns us right into dust and scattered old bones, and nothin’s left of our whole country and our finest cities except some street paving and a few cellars with weeds in ’em. You get me, John?”

Booth Tarkington – The Plutocrat (1927)


It’s a fascinating novel because Tinker is right, we have no way of standing still, no way to settle for the here and now. Tomorrow there is another here and now then another. Ideologies and cultures are of no lasting value unless they allow us to adapt and adapt again forever.


The somewhere we’re goin’ to, and got to go to if we don’t want to get wiped out, it’s somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead!