The Pleasures of Life | Page 3

beautiful version:
"We are the voices of the wandering wind, Which moan for rest, and rest can never find. Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life-- A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife."
If indeed this be true, if mortal life be so sad and full of suffering, no wonder that Nirvana--the cessation of sorrow--should be welcomed even at the sacrifice of consciousness.
But ought we not to place before ourselves a very different ideal--a healthier, manlier, and nobler hope?
Life is not to live merely, but to live well. There are some "who live without any design at all, and only pass in the world like straws on a river: they do not go; they are carried," [4]--but as Homer makes Ulysses say, "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rest unburnished; not to shine in use--as though to breathe were life!"
Goethe tells us that at thirty he resolved "to work out life no longer by halves, but in all its beauty and totality."
"Im Ganzen, Guten, Sch?nen Resolut zu leben."
Life indeed must be measured by thought and action, not by time. It certainly may be, and ought to be, bright, interesting, and happy; and, according to the Italian proverb, "if all cannot live on the Piazza, every one may feel the sun."
If we do our best; if we do not magnify trifling troubles; if we look resolutely, I do not say at the bright side of things, but at things as they really are; if we avail ourselves of the manifold blessings which surround us; we cannot but feel that life is indeed a glorious inheritance.
"More servants wait on man Than he'll take notice of. In every path He treads down that which doth befriend him When sickness makes him pale and wan Oh mighty Love! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him." [5]
Few of us, however, realize the wonderful privilege of living, or the blessings we inherit; the glories and beauties of the Universe, which is our own if we choose to have it so; the extent to which we can make ourselves what we wish to be; or the power we possess of securing peace, of triumphing over pain and sorrow.
Dante pointed to the neglect of opportunities as a serious fault:
"Man can do violence To himself and his own blessings, and for this He, in the second round, must aye deplore, With unavailing penitence, his crime. Whoe'er deprives himself of life and light In reckless lavishment his talent wastes, And sorrows then when he should dwell in joy."
Ruskin has expressed this with special allusion to the marvellous beauty of this glorious world, too often taken as a matter of course, and remembered, if at all, almost without gratitude. "Holy men," he complains, "in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on His giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which He gives to all inferior creatures): they require us not to thank Him for that glory of His works which He has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even: they dwell on the duty of self denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight:" and yet, as he justly says elsewhere, "each of us, as we travel the way of life, has the choice, according to our working, of turning all the voices of Nature into one song of rejoicing; or of withering and quenching her sympathy into a fearful withdrawn silence of condemnation,--into a crying out of her stones and a shaking of her dust against us."
Must we not all admit, with Sir Henry Taylor, that "the retrospect of life swarms with lost opportunities"? "Whoever enjoys not life," says Sir T. Browne, "I count him but an apparition, though he wears about him the visible affections of flesh."
St. Bernard, indeed, goes so far as to maintain that "nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."
Some Heathen moralists also have taught very much the same lesson. "The gods," says Marcus Aurelius, "have put all the means in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils. Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make his life worse?"
Epictetus takes the same line: "If a man is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault; for God has made all men to be happy." "I am," he elsewhere says, "always content with that which happens; for I think that what God chooses