spectre of universal death, the
all-encompassing blackness:--

"What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the
Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold,
all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which befalleth the
sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other, all
are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.... The dead know not
anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
is forgotten. Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now
perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything
that is done under the Sun.... Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant
thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a man live many
years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of
darkness; for they shall be many."

In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together.
But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two
are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness
thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre
surrounds it.

To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the
joy-destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only
relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying: "Stuff and
nonsense, get out into the open air!" or "Cheer up, old fellow, you'll
be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!" But in
all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a
rational answer? To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky
contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very
consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie
indeed too deep for THAT cure. The fact that we CAN die, that we CAN
be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment
live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not
correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good
that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of
nature.

It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. "The
trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and
goodness," said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort,
"and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and
disconcerted at its being possible." And so with