And me, still sketching as we float.
Did I really read or only dream somewhere that anecdote of an elderly painter, who, going over one day, with a friend of his youth, who had known him in his prime and promise, a series of his popular and most admired pieces, said mournfully, ‘All these poor, unmeaning, ill-designed, half-executed things, I have made to earn bread and time to do that,’ pointing to a chaotic, unfinished canvas at the end of the room, ‘and that, after all, is as bad as any of them.’ ‘This also,’ saith the Preacher, ‘is a sore evil that I have seen under the sun.’
To grow old, therefore, learning and unlearning, is such the conclusion? Conclusion or no conclusion, such, alas! appears to be our inevitable lot, the fixed ordinance of the life we live. The cruel king Tarchetius gave his daughters a web to weave, upon the completion of which he said they should get married; and what these involuntary Penelopes did in the daytime, servants by his orders undid at night. A hopeless and a weary work, indeed, especially for young people desirous to get married.
Weaving and unweaving, learning and unlearning, learning painfully, painfully unlearning, under the orders of the cruel king Tarchetius, behold—are we to say, ‘our life’? ‘Every new lesson,’ saith the Oriental proverb, ‘is another grey hair; and time will pluck out this also.’ And what saith the Preacher? ‘I, the Preacher, was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under the heavens; this sore travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith.’ Perchè pensa? Pensando s’invecchia,’ said the young, unthinking Italian to the grave German sitting by him in the diligence, whose name was Goethe. Is it true?
To spend uncounted years of pain
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near;
Upon the mind to hold them clear,