After all that can be said, most men are reluctant to look Time in the face. The close of the year or a birthday is to them merely a time of revelry, into which they enter in order to turn away from depressing thought. They shrink from what seems to them the dreary truth, that they are drifting to a dark abyss. To many the milestones along the path of life are tombstones, every epoch being mainly associated in their memories with a death. To some, past time is nothing—a closed chapter never to be reopened.
The past is nothing, and at last,
The future can but be the past.
To others, the thought of the work achieved in the vanished years is the most real and abiding of their possessions. They can feel the force of the noble lines of Dryden:
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.
He who would look Time in the face without illusion and without fear should associate each year as it passes with new developments of his nature; with duties accomplished, with work performed. To fill the time allotted to us to the brim with action and with thought is the only way in which we can learn to watch its passage with equanimity.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Monte-Naken.
[75] See The Mystery of Sleep, by John Bigelow.