Life

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Title:     Life
Author: Richard King [More Titles by King]

Life is rather like a rocket; it shoots into the sky, flares, fades, and falls to the ground in dust so unnoticeable that you can hardly find its remnants, search how you may. Of course, I know that our lives don't really shoot upwards towards the stars to illumine the heavens by their own resplendent beams, but we usually think they're going to, sometimes we think they do, and then, when our dreams settle down to reality, we discover that our fate has been scarcely different from the crowd, and that our life stands out about as unique as one house is in a row of houses all built on the same pattern. But I sometimes think that our dreams are our real life, and that what we do is a matter of indifference to what we think and suffer and feel. Some days, when you sit in a railway carriage on the underground railways and gaze at the rows of stodgy, expressionless, flat kind of faces which the majority of the travellers possess, you say to yourself, "These people can have had no history; these people cannot have really lived; they cannot have suffered and struggled and hoped and dreamed and renounced, renounced so often with the heart frozen beyond tears." And yet you know they must have done--perhaps they are living a whole lifetime of mental agony even as you watch them, who can tell?--because you have been "through the mill" too, you too have walked to Amaous, sat desolate in the Garden of Gethsemane, seen all your fondest dreams crucified on the Cross of Reality, and risen again, lonelier, sadder, wiser maybe, but with a wisdom which is more desolate than the wilderness. You have been through Hell, and no one has guessed, no one has seen, no one has ever, ever known. And these people, so stodgy, so expressionless, so dreary and conventional, must have been through it too. For it seems to me that we must all go through it some time or other, and the bigger, the braver your heart the greater the Hell; the more sensitive, the more susceptible you are to the love which links one human being with another, the greater your pain, the more desolate your renunciation. And, as I said before, nobody guesses, nobody believes, nobody ever, ever knows.

So very, very few people can see beyond the outward and visible signs of pain. They see the smile, the fretfulness--and yet they think the smile means happiness and the fretfulness an ugly, tiresome thing. They do not perceive that often the smile is as a cry to Heaven, and that fretfulness is but the sign of a soul breaking itself against the jagged rocks of hopelessness and doubt. I often listen to the people speaking of blindness and the blind. They only see that the eyes are gone, that the glory which is spring is for ever dead; they perceive the hesitating walk, the outstretched groping hand which, to my mind, is more pitiful than the story of the Cross, and inwardly they murmur, "How awful!" and sometimes they turn away. But they have never seen the real tragedy which lies behind the visible handicap. Only their imagination is stirred by the outward and visible side of the tragedy; never--or rather, very rarely--is it haunted by the realisation of the despair which is struggling to find peace, some solution of the meaning of it all, struggling to bring back some reasoned hope and gladness, some tiny ray of light in the mental and physical darkness, without which we none of us can believe, we none of us can live. Perhaps they are wise to see so little of the real sorrow which dogs so many lives, but they, nevertheless, are blind in their turn. They are wise, because there is a whole wise philosophy of a sort in being deaf to the song within the song, blind to the tears which no one sees, to the trembling lip which is the aftermath of--oh, so many smiles. The philosopher perceives just enough of the heart-beat of the world to keep the human touch, but not enough to kill the outbursts of unreasoned joy which make the picture of life so exhilarating and jolly. And yet . . . and yet . . . oh yes, happiness _does_ lie in remembering little, perceiving less, and in pinning your love and faith in God--in human love, in human gratitude, in human unselfishness scarcely at all. Happiness, I say, lies thus--but alas! not everybody can or ever will be happy. They feel too greatly--and if in intense feeling there is divine beauty, there is also incalculable pain. When the "ingrate" is turned out of Heaven they do not send him to Hell, they send him to Earth and give him imagination and a heart.

[The end]
Richard King's essay: Life

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