and troubled as myself, if I had known more about them. But
in that moment they were finding leisure simply to taste and enjoy the
wholesome savours of life, and were neither looking backward in regret
nor forward in anticipation. I dare say the jokes that amused them were
mild enough, and that I should have found their conversation tedious
and tiresome if I had been made one of the party. But they were
symbolical; they stood for me, and will stand, as a type of what we
ought to aim at more; and that is simply LIVING. It is a lesson which
you yourself are no doubt learning in your fragrant, shady garden. You
have no need to make money, and your only business is to get better.
But for myself, I know that I work and think and hope and fear too
much, and that in my restless pursuit of a hundred aims and ambitions
and dreams and fancies, I am constantly in danger of hardly living at
all, but of simply racing on, like a man intoxicated with affairs,
without leisure for strolling, for sitting, for talking, for watching
the sky and the earth, smelling the scents of flowers, noting the funny
ways of animals, playing with children, eating and drinking. Yet this
is our true heritage, and this is what it means to be a man; and, after
all, one has (for all one knows) but a single life, and that a short
one. It is at such moments as these that I wake as from a dream, and
think how fast my life flows on, and how very little conscious of its
essence I am. My head is full from morning to night of everything
except living. For a busy man this is, of course, to a certain extent
inevitable. But where I am at fault is in not relapsing at intervals
into a wise and patient passivity, and sitting serenely on the shore of
the sea of life, playing with pebbles, seeing the waves fall and the
ships go by, and wondering at the strange things cast up by the waves,
and the sharp briny savours of the air. Why do I not do this? Because,
to continue my confession, it bores me. I must, it seems, be always in
a fuss; be always hauling myself painfully on to some petty ambition or
some shadowy object that I have in view; and the moment I have reached
it, I must fix upon another, and begin the process over again. It is
this lust for doing something tangible, for sitting down quickly and
writing fifty, for having some definite result to show, which is the
ruin of me and many others. After all, when it is done, what worth has
it? I am not a particularly succes