Diogenes of London (collection)/The Facility of Life
THE FACILITY OF LIFE
IT has in all times been a part of our creed to think sadly upon our human estate, which is the gift of God, and to consider ourselves no better than bondmen till we be free of our carnal husk. The growing voice of ages has proclaimed this wretched investiture of flesh to be a continuous evil, so that with the cloud of witnesses we have come to take it for a common axiom of life. Yet upon the facts this would seem a foolish assumption, and may indeed be rebutted as an error of the supersensitive. Perhaps it is the Christian faith that has most favoured the error; yet such as Socrates had the same thought, and we should rather regard it as succeeding naturally to a sympathetic contemplation of human suffering. So long have our philosophers impressed upon us that we live at war, in a plenitude of sorrows and losses, distraught with the horrors of our environment, agape upon the sudden breaches in our immediate ranks, that almost any one of us may now, upon provocation, fall to tears at the moral of it. And yet were it only true that man had this agony of life for a constant purview, poor Nature had long since succumbed to the wretched neighbourhood; there had been no duty more sacred, as no prospect more inviting, than the release of the frail tenant from the frailer clay. Philosopher and theologian have held life to be nothing but a toilsome pilgrimage to some peaceful bourne—it may be Paradise, or haply oblivion. The balance (they have both declared) is against us here; but (quoth the one) it shall be readjusted upon the dissolution of our mortal frame; while the other has looked oftener to a restitution in the conclusion of death. Must we, then, confess to this grotesque subservience to a shadowy faith, or to a grim patience? Surely, were the balance ever against us, the soul had determined its own miseries upon the first appreciation of the horrid iniquity. We are surely to say that there are all but none to whom this existence has sincerely seemed intolerable; nay, that there are few that have not judged it, at the worst, a pleasing tragicomedy with an impertinent ending. Yet should you go by their open professions this were not so. How glibly falls from the tongue the deprecation of a thing so shameful and unworthy! It is possible to take no pride in life, if we be rightly minded. At each turn we hold up our hands and lengthen our faces upon the knowledge that we are still in travail. We shake our heads upon a calamity, remarking how truly sorrow is our portion. But withal this profession is, as it were, a mere habit of the outward features, as you may grimace at the conception of a pain you have not felt. In the life it is but an hypothesis, a supposition of our fathers which it is seemly to acknowledge upon decent occasions.
Were a proof of this assertion needed you would find it in the very fact of life; for that cannot be odious which all use with such affection. We cannot doubt that, were this vain repetition true, humanity had effaced itself, for it is clear man has never lacked spirit for a desperate act. But perhaps, you will say, it is not from fear of death the race is withheld from this obliteration, but rather by the hope of a fortune that never befalls. This hope, you may urge, and not a real preponderance of happiness, keeps us from the desire of that final equilibrium. And were this so, is not hope also an integral part of the human equipment, to be reckoned in the general sum of our substantial pleasures? Being of our carnal endowment, this too must go into the scales against evil. And in the higher natures, I doubt not, so subtle a property must raise a formidable barrier 'twixt life and death; though, unhappily, it is also so ethereal that upon a change it may dissolve and leave clear a sudden access. But it is not hope inspires the most of us with content; it is rather the immediate and manifest delights of living. And how many there are if we rightly divine them! The whole journey is to the last full of opportunities of happiness for mind and body, though some so fatuously ignore them. It is here, in truth, while we thrust our hideous ancestry from our rarer minds, we yet derive from it our greatest blessing; for it is only so far as we are of common clay with the brute that we can forget and enjoy. The brute proceeds upon his grosser pleasures with a blind complacency from which our finer natures, an ineffectual compromise between God and him, shrink and wince. It is to such as he, nevertheless, we owe our desire of life. For to forget and to enjoy—these are the capacities that serve us best, and these are of the brute's prerogative. To those of human kind that have these fulfilled life can be nothing but an ample satisfaction; to him that has his just share of them life is this tolerable affair I have said. The joys of living may, indeed, be of no great proportions, but they are ever-recurrent, small, unexpected, immediate, grateful. You would account them meagre and unsatisfying did you regard them as a philosopher; yet by their continuous passage they yield a sense of repletion. You will gather a score of them ere you rise; they will pursue you all day if you have eyes for them; they are incessant and multitudinous. The flesh wherewith you are clothed will exult in them, if you will permit; the mind will passively absorb them. They are in your delicate senses, in your gentle meditations, in your books, in the air, everywhere. Is the wind soft, it is a charm; be it chill, how brightly bums the fire; does it snow, you may admire a white world! You must snatch these delights from the hour, neither remembering evil nor forecasting; you must train your mind to the habit; your senses must be alert; you must laugh; you must be content; you must forget. There is always magic in the air if you will forget.
It is this forgetfulness which is, after all, the foundation of our pleasures, for in memory is the weightier part of our misfortunes. Of a truth in the course of our journey many pains befall, and there are times of gross evil, when sorrow, as a toad, squats in our doorway, when the scales kick the balance with a rush. In such an hour we come to look upon life as the dreary passage of our commonplaces; there is neither present gain nor future hope. But how soon this mood passes! From our base ancestry we have the divine gift of forgetfulness. In a little we are upon our way again, a lessening memory at our backs; growing ruddy and merry, laughing, deriding, scoffing, enjoying, taking the blandishments of the moment with a heart of the lightest. And thus do we trip along the road, with a lapse here and there (in a trice forgotten), until we are come to the verge; and lo, how short has been the journey which once stretched out so far! how pleasant the way we have feared at times would prove so dreary! How they all fade, sorrows and pains and memories! and upon the verge how finite they seem against the eternal! Life is very facile to animals; it is facile also to the supreme animal.
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at the Edinburgh University Press.