9
Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and it never can be so long as life remains the unpatterned thing we discern it to be. If life were completely patterned it would most certainly not be worth living. When we say that life is unpatterned we mean, of course, that we cannot read all its patterns (we like to assume that all patterns are there, because it comforts us to think of a fundamental Order and Symmetry).
But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so long as we cannot discern all its patterns, life is eager, interesting, surprising and altogether distracting and lovely however bewildering and distressing, too. Different people take the unreadable differently. Some, like Thomas Hardy, take it in defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like Joseph Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder. Hardy sees the disorder that he cannot fathom; Conrad admires the design that he can only incompletely trace. To Hardy the world is a place where—
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.”
To Conrad the world is a place where men may continually make the glorious and heartening discovery that a solidarity exists among them; that they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is mysterious.
And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Hergesheimer writing Java Head, the world is a place where it is momentarily sufficient to trace casual symmetries without thought of their relation to an ineluctable whole.