STAYING ALIVE
Sir,-Your entertaining and delicately ironical editorial on the above subject prompts me to suggest that maybe one secret of staying alive is to arrive at the point where you don’t care whether you stay alive or not. This may be one of the compensations of age. In youth and maturity we are prisoners of mental and emotional stimuli and dazzled by dreams that tend to make living intensely worth while. But the robber years filch from us those things we value most and presently we arrive at the time when life has no more horizons. Then, surveying our pilgrimage, realising that in spite of all the key to the mystery of life is still missing, we arrive at serenity by contemplating passing hence, to be done for ever with the fevers and frustrations of this life, to rest in oblivion for ever, and ever, and ever, or-who knows? During my personal spin I have been through quite a collection of physical and mental "isms," and done my share of all those things which we ought not to do and left undone those which we ought to do. I continue to stay alive because, as indi- cated above, I don’t care whether I do or not, but while I do, education, environment and my own standards lead me to carry on and gather such rosebuds, affections and felicities as may be mine along the way.
J. MALTON
MURRAY
(Oamaru).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19560504.2.12.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 874, 4 May 1956, Page 5
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240STAYING ALIVE New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 874, 4 May 1956, Page 5
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