It was not a pensive or luxurious
emotion, but a tumult of vehement feeling, bearing the bark of the soul
triumphantly along. She would have been distressed and even indignant
if I had revealed my thoughts; but the fact was there for all that;
instead of brooding or fretting over small affairs, she was face to
face with one of the great unanswerable, unfathomable facts of life,
and her spirit drank in the solemnity, the greatness of it, as a flower
after a drought drinks in the steady plunging rain.
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.
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