NEVER DWELL ON SORROWS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 424, 15 August 1908, Page 4

NEVER DWELL ON SORROWS.

Human life, as a whole, may appear somewhat sorrowful, and it is easier in a manner pleasanter even, to speak of its sorrows and let the mind dwell on them, than to go in search of and bring into prominence the consolations life has to offer.

Sorrows abound — infallible, evident sorrows. Consolations, or rather, the reasons wherefore we accept with some gladness the duties of life, are rare and uncertain and hard of detection.

Sorrow seems noble and lofty and fraught with deep mystery, with mystery that is almost personal, that we feel to be near us. Consolations appear egotistical, squalid, at times almost base, but for all that, and whatever their ephemeral likeness may be, we have only to draw closer to them to find that they, too, have their mystery, and it this seems less visible and less comprehensible, it is only because it lies deeper and is far more mysterious. The desire to live, the acceptance of life, as it is, may perhaps be mere vulgar expressions, but they are probably in unconscious harmony with laws that are vaster, more conformable with the spirit of the universe, and therefore more sacred than is the desire to escape the sorrows of life or the lofty but disenchanted wisdom that forever dwells on those sorrows.

Our impulse is always to depict life as more sorrowful than truly it is, and this is a serious error, to be excused only by the doubts that at present hang over us. No satisfying explanation has so far been found. The destiny of man is as subject to unknown forces to-day as it was in the days of old, and though it be true that some of these forces have vanished, others have arisen in their stead. The number of those who are really all powerful has in no way diminished.

From one point of view, unhappiness must always remain the portion of man, and the fatal abyss be ever open before him, vowed as he is to death, to the fickleness of matter, to old age and disease. If we fix our eyes only upon the end of life, the happiest and most triumphant existence must of necessity contain its elements of misery and fatality.

But let us not make a wrong use of these words; above all, let us not, through listlessness or undue inclinations to mystic sorrow, be induced to lessen the part of what could be explained if we would only give more eager attention to the ideas, the passions and feelings of the life of man and the nature of things.