For These Same
Good Folks Are Vanished, The Scandal Having Scattered Them To The Winds.
He Begins To Breathe Again, And Employ His Hours To Better Purpose.
If
he loses both money and reputation he must feel, I should think, as
though treading on air.
The last fools gone! And no sage lacks friends.
Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is. Then ask yourself
whether it be worth while paying any attention to what he thinks of you.
Life is too short, and death the end of all things. Life must be lived,
not endured. Were the day twice as long as it is, a man might find it
diverting to probe down into that unsatisfactory fellow-creature and try
to reach some common root of feeling other than those physiological
needs which we share with every beast of earth. Diverting; hardly
profitable. It would be like looking for a flea in a haystack, or a joke
in the Bible. They can perhaps be found; at the expense of how much
trouble!
Therefore the sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing
ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the
inevitable development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds. He
scorns to make proselytes among his fellows: they are not worth it. He
has better things to do. While others nurse their griefs, he nurses his
joy. He endeavours to find himself at no matter what cost, and to be
true to that self when found - a worthy and ample occupation for a
life-time. The happiness-of-the-greatest-number, of those who pasture on
delusions: what dreamer is responsible for this eunuchry? Mill, was it?
Bentham, more likely. As if the greatest number were not necessarily the
least-intelligent! As if their happiness were not necessarily
incompatible with that of the sage! Why foster it? He is a poor
philosopher, who cuts his own throat. Away with their ghosts;
de-spiritualize yourself; what you cannot find on earth is not worth
seeking.
That charming M. M., I fear, will never compass this clarity of vision,
this perfect de-spiritualization and contempt of illusions. He will
never remain curious, to his dying day, in things terrestrial and in
nothing else. From a Jewish-American father he has inherited that all
too common taint of psychasthenia (miscalled neurasthenia); he
confesses, moreover, - like other men of strong carnal proclivities - to
certain immaterial needs and aspirations after "the beyond." Not one of
these earthquake-specialists, in fact, but has his Achilles heel: a
mental crotchet or physical imperfection to mar the worldly perspective.
Not one of them, at close of life, will sit beside some open window in
view of a fair landscape and call up memories of certain moments which
no cataclysms have taken from him; not one will lay them in the balance
and note how they outweigh, in their tiny grains of gold, the dross of
an age of other men's lives.
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