And so one might go on quoting the old moral, shadowed by different texts. Perhaps Sterne expresses it as pithily as any epigrammatist, “life” being but another term for time: “What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side? from sorrow to sorrow? to button up one cause of vexation, and unbutton another?” But Sterne deals with the shadow only, while the gnomon of the dial presents its side of sunshine equally with its side of shade, however somber the tone of the inscription. Doubtless Nature preaches more truly than man. Life is not all composed of shadow, nor all of sunshine; and if we but cultivate the spirit of contentment, possibly we have solved its sternest problem.
But may contentment, after all, be had for the striving? “Whatever it be that falleth into our knowledge and jouissance,” reasons Montaigne in the fifty-third chapter of the First Book, “we finde it doth not satisfie us, and we still follow and gape after future, uncertaine, and unknowne things, because the present and knowne please us not, and doe not satisfie us. Not (as I thinke) because they have not sufficiently wherewith to satiate and please us, but the reason is, that we apprehend and seize on them with an unruly, disordered, and a diseased taste and hold-fast.” And, again, in the twelfth chapter of the Second Book: “All of the Philosophers of all the sects that ever were doe generally agree on this point, that the chiefest felicitie, or summum bonum, consisteth in the peace and tranquillitie of the soul and bodie:—but where shall we find it?”
Somewhere, slumbering upon the shelves, there exists a golden book of a former century, written by a learned French philosopher-pantologist, entitled L’Art de se rendre heureux par les Songes (The Art of rendering one’s self happy by Dreams). A unique volume and the labor of a lifetime, its present owner and the fortunate possessor of the secret has never been discovered; and, alas! a reprint does not exist. Contentment—is this but another name for Illusion?—is a bird of passage who, soaring high in the empyrean, must be secured on the wing. Numberless those who would ensnare him, and innumerable the lures set to turn his evasive pinion. But he flies not in flocks; and, dimly outlined against the distant sky, he is ever flitting onward, far out of range. Some one, farther on, who seeks him not, perchance looks serenely upward, and unconsciously charms him down....
My fair and gracious reader, is it you?
XIII.
AUTHORS AND READERS.
There must be both a judgment and a fervor; a discrimination and a boyish eagerness; and (with all due humility) something of a point of contact between authors worth reading and the reader.—Leigh Hunt, My Books.
A truly good book is something as natural and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.—Thoreau.