These categories you will remember consist in two columns: the first, grouse; the second, ingenious gratitude. In the first column: "I find myself upon a beach, shipwrecked, without any money, very damp and with nothing to eat." In the opposite column: "On the other hand I might have been born a chimpanzee in a place where chimpanzees are hunted."
It is one way of getting consolation, and a very epicurean way, in the strictest sense of the term epicurean.
Do the same about the weather. "It rains. I have not seen the sun for three months. But, on the other hand, I might be freezing to death in the Arctic, or sitting up with a candle killing scorpions on some damned barren island of the Levantine Seas."
The crab about this method is that it does not really satisfy the mind. I have only to use these words "Levantine Seas," when at once the man deprived of sun thinks of sunlight and the man deprived of warmth thinks of warmth, and the scorpion seems a delightful beast, and if the island is barren, so much the better; it means that there is not too much rain, which is a curse.
I have noticed that men living in climates not human, never even try to console themselves, as do people living in England, which has the best climate in the world. They do not say: "Would that I were in a place of clouds and water!" They sit down sullenly (though with bright eyes), endure it, and die. It is only people just on the edge of perfection who complain. It is so with social things. The loudest cry rises not from the seller of papers in the streets, but from the man who finds that there is something wrong with his big motor-car, or that he cannot reserve a carriage to the Riviera, but has to travel in a train full of Frenchmen.
And to go back to climate.
If one could exactly balance all the things which one desires in a climate, I will tell you what would happen. One would lose three things, each more important than the last—energy, decent morals and happiness. I suppose that what one would exactly balance in a climate would be a sufficiency of moisture without discomfort, a sufficiency of light without loss of repose, and a sufficiency of heat without the breeding of noxious things. I take it that the climate of the Balearics in early March carried on throughout the year would fill the bill; or rather the climate of the Balearics supplemented by large rivers which had no mud upon their banks and never overflowed or ran dry, deep forests which were never tangled or marshy, and sublime mountains which never sent down tempest or any other disaster, and which were not, as most mountains are, inhabited by demons.
Well, if one lived in such a climate, I say that one would lose energy and morals and happiness. They say that the mind turns inward when it suffers too much sorrow. That is true; but it remains alive. It turns inward also, but in a permanent, dead fashion, when it has no stimulus at all. What people really mean when they say that they would like a perfect climate (granted that they are human beings and not immortals) is that they would like to preserve all the advantages they have acquired from living in their own climate, and yet have them in another and a more delightful climate. Another way of putting it is that they would like all the advantages of contrast without the disadvantages of tedium. Or, to put it more simply still, they would like to go on assuaging their thirst for ever and yet never assuaging it. It is a contradiction in terms; at least, for mortals.
The immortals, by the way, had very odd ideas upon climate. It was the custom of the Gods of Hellas (who had an excellent climate offered them on the slopes of the hills) to take their leisure above the snow-line, and then at a moment's notice to go south of the first cataract of the Nile into a fiendish heat and eat heavily for days with the Ethiopians, just as our rich go to the Riviera. But with this difference: that they went to Ethiopia not only for climate but for the morals of the inhabitants—which is more than you can say of those who go to the Riviera, my experience of which detestable belt is that no one can decide who most despises the other, the aboriginal or his visitants. The Gods of Hellas also (now dead, because the climate changed) rather concerned themselves with controlling climate than with enjoying it. And that, by the way, is a lesson for us. They were the masters of their environment, and not its subjects. The same is true of very young people, whom I, with these mine eyes, have seen deliberately taking a walk in the rain, or picking up snow itself in their hands, or (what may seem incredible) bathing in cold water and swimming about in it: and when I say cold water I mean very cold water, as, for instance, the English seas in April.