I will not say that this is the secret of life; for it is a faculty of
temperament, and cannot be acquired. But I reflected how much finer and
stronger it was than my own tendency to be bewildered and cowed beneath
a robust stroke of fate. I felt that the thing one ought to aim at
doing was to look experience steadily in the face, whether sweet or
bitter, to interrogate it firmly, to grasp its significance. If one
cowers away from it, if one tries to distract and beguile the soul, to
forget the grief in feverish activity, well, one may succeed in dulling
the pain as by some drug or anodyne; but the lesson of life is thereby
deferred. Why should one so faint-heartedly persist in making choice of
experiences, in welcoming what is pleasant, what feeds our vanity and
self-satisfaction, what gives one, like the rich fool, the sense of
false security of goods stored up for the years? We are set in life to
feel insecure, or at all events to gain stability and security of soul,
not to prop up our failing and timid senses upon the pillows of wealth
and ease and circumstance. The man whom I entirely envy is the man who
walks into the dark valley of misfortune or sickness or grief, or the
shadow of death, with a curious and inexpressible zest for facing and
interrogating the presences that haunt the place. For a man who does
this, his memory is not like a land where he loves to linger upon the
sunlit ridges of happy recollection, but a land where in reflection he
threads in backward thought the dark vale, the miry road, the craggy
rift up which he painfully climbed; the optimism that hurries with
averted glance past the shadow is as false as the pessimism that
hurries timidly across the bright and flowery meadow. The more we
realise the immutability of our lot, the more grateful we become for
our pains as well as for our delights. If we have still lives to live
and regions to traverse, after our eyes close upon the world, those
lives and those regions may be, as we love to think, tracts of serener
happiness and more equable tranquillity. But if they be still a