s
causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a
numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad
manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private;
and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life
for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather
doesn't get.

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.
Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's
privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development.
Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear
of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing
in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the
hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain
to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a
ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as
they came along, with Catullus singing their _vivamus atque amemus_, and
practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they
will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past
life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt
sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good
deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to,
it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it
won't be the days when we _didn't_ that we shall recall with a sense of
possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically _did_.
Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland!
Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the
city!

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou
shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the
nymphs in the brake.

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of
the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower.
It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The
temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our
middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have
unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest
dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by