“I’m tired of life myself,” he said. “Have been for years now. And yet I potter about trying to keep others alive, when I daresay they’re just as tired of it as I am. Doesn’t seem much sense in it anyway.”
Ormarr shook his head.
“Life is a precious thing,” he said. “And often we don’t realize it until it is too late. Then we fall to musing dismally about it, instead of using our experience for the good of others—for those who are to come after us. We say to ourselves: I have suffered; so will they. Well, why not? Let them look after themselves. But why have we suffered? Because we are narrow-minded and ungrateful. Surely we have known some glorious moments; how can we complain of life after? Life is a round of ceaseless change, day and night, sunshine and rain; we ourselves pass from the unknown to the unknown again ... and that is why a moment of harmony we call happiness is a wondrous thing—a thing that can never be paid for throughout all eternity.”
“You may be right,” said the doctor. “I feel myself an ungrateful creature at this moment.”
“I have only felt that harmony myself at moments when I was able to forget myself entirely in my music,” Ormarr went on. “And then it was really only a complete forgetfulness of all that was passing around me. How much greater must be the happiness of those who meet in harmony; two human beings sharing happiness! For them it is the rising of a sun that nothing can darken but the grave.”
The doctor bowed his head.
“And then?” he said. “When the grave had taken one of them?”
“Would you wish you had never known the happiness that has given you the greatest sorrow of your life?”
The doctor shook his head. “No! Not if it cost me all eternity in torture.”
“Have you ever thought of it before?”