numbers."

_Life_

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