Our Trivial Bodies
i
Though we think so much of our body, it is in reality a small part of us. Before birth we get together our tools, in life we use them, and thus fashion our true life which consists not in our tools and tool-box but in the work we have done with our tools. It is Handel’s work, not the body with which he did the work, that pulls us half over London. There is not an action of a muscle in a horse’s leg upon a winter’s night as it drags a carriage to the Albert Hall but is in connection with, and part outcome of, the force generated when Handel sat in his room at Gopsall and wrote the Messiah. Think of all the forces which that force has controlled, and think, also, how small was the amount of molecular disturbance from which it proceeded. It is as though we saw a conflagration which a spark had kindled. This is the true Handel, who is a more living power among us one hundred and twenty-two years after his death than during the time he was amongst us in the body.
ii
The whole life of some people is a kind of partial death—a long, lingering death-bed, so to speak, of stagnation and nonentity on which death is but the seal, or solemn signing, as the abnegation of all further act and deed on the part of the signer. Death robs these people of even that little strength which they appeared to have and gives them nothing but repose.
On others, again, death confers a more living kind of life than they can ever possibly have enjoyed while to those about them they seemed to be alive. Look at Shakespeare; can he be properly said to have lived in anything like his real life till a hundred years or so after his death? His physical life was but as a dawn preceding the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. True, there was a little stir—a little abiding of shepherds in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night—a little buzzing in knots of men waiting to be hired before the daybreak—a little stealthy movement as of a burglar or two here and there—an inchoation of life. But the true life of the man was after death and not before it.
Death is not more the end of some than it is the beginning of others. So he that loses his soul may find it, and he that finds may lose it.