There is a singular but comforting contrast in the influence of time on pleasure and pain and the mental states which correspond to them.
Through repetition and habitual exercise we may become passionately fond of what at first was painful or disgusting. Witness the use of tobacco and all other so-called “acquired tastes.” The physician becomes enamored of the studies of the hospital ward and the dissecting room; persons who are at first sight repulsive become tolerable and then companionable; studies which we take up with dislike later on fascinate us.
How different with pleasures! Their tendency is not upward but downward, gravitating ever toward the lower and painful strata of sensation. Those built on a foundation of previous pain alone escape a merely evanescent existence. How quickly facile loves are sated! Ennui arrives never earlier than when enjoyment is gratuitous. The law, alas, holds good even for our dearest joys; as Mrs. Browning wrote:—
“Entertain
Your best and gladdest thoughts but long enough,
And they will all prove sad enough to sting.”
Time, transmuter of all things, turns delight into disgust, and aversion into love, but his metamorphoses constantly warn us that permanence is related to painfulness and duration depends on endurance.
Pain is more natural to us than pleasure. We bear it better. Bad fortune is easier sustained than good. The hour of prosperity is more trying than that of adversity. These are commonplaces, and speak for the universal recognition of this feature of mind.