The Wisdom of Life

The length of a man's life, and his happiness in it, for him or against him, owe nothing to conditions and circumstances; for those who go seeking their own doom with their own hands, and exchange their balm for their bane, are too many to be counted, and they outnumber those whom the fates drive to death and whom time wrongs with an executed judgment and a sealed decree.

No wonder, then, that Seneca, the ancient Roman philosopher, said: "Man's most bitter enemy is the one lurking between the curves of his ribs, lying in wait in his breast." Nor is it hard for us, after that, to find La Bruyère saying: "Many people spend their time and pour out their strength in making their fellow creatures miserable and wretched." So much for the evil that comes from man himself. But there are scourges that do not merely sting—they envenom whoever touches them while he feels not the least foreboding of them, as though he knew and knew not. How many an old man's worn-out bones ache at the decay that has hastened upon them, and cry out against the boiling, rebellious blood of youth that exposed them to what they ought to have been spared; for after he had won what he craved, the old man now seeks strength in the very season of his need of it, and so strikes the loser's bargain and bites the fingers of remorse for what he gambled away in the days of his youth—he sold it whole for a few coins of passing pleasure, and repented when the hour of repentance was past.

It behooves us, then, this being the case, to look at life only on the side of its merits, folding the page over its faults; and it may even be given to us to deny the very existence of misfortunes and sorrows by dropping the words "if" and "if only," "perhaps" and "maybe"—for the bitterest words over which the tongue stumbles, which weigh heavy on the ear and at whose reading the soul contracts, are these: Would that I had done it! Would that I had not done it! The chance offered itself to me and I did not take it... and so on.

Often the imagined evil is the certain good, fallen out of its proper place: recklessness and rashness beside courage and daring; silliness and weakness beside love and tenderness; miserliness and stinting beside economy and moderation—and that because everything has a time and a place, and only in them is it fitting. It is self-evident that a walker's foot may slip, so that he falls and his bones are crushed; nature knows neither mercy nor favor, and that is nothing but inexorable decree.

It is a settled matter among the learned men of this age that a man's slips and lapses, whether committed deliberately or unwittingly, are alone the cause of his misfortunes and trials. Is there not, of ignorance and error, that which we know for certain to be of grievous consequence, yet from which we are not deterred? And that whose nature is hidden from us, so that the soul tempts us to embrace it without any insight into its results? Nor let us forget that in human nature there is that conscience which is called "the voice of God in man," the best restrainer and deterrent a man has, commanding him to what is good and forbidding him what is evil.

We have also, in the power of perception and the power of comparison and adjustment—which are the two mainstays of judgment and choice—another aid that guides us to the good and keeps us far from the bad. There is no doubt that these powers are not created in a man at the height of perfection; rather, it is cultivation by knowledge and experience that brings them near the needed perfection, until they can tell the lean from the fat and the good from the vile.

That a man may the more easily avoid many of these perils and misfortunes, he must hold fast to what his parents instilled in him, and to the sincere counsel and sound guidance they enjoined upon him. Yet this alone does not guarantee escape from stumbling; the whole of wisdom lies rather in a man's knowing that he has a soul, and that he himself is the one answerable for training its character, refining its feelings, and cultivating its gifts.

Let no graduate of a school, then, be deluded by having carried off the palm from his fellows, or by having gained a diploma or an academic rank; for experience has drawn the veil from a bright and dazzling truth, namely: "He who finishes school is a beginner in the world, entering the ranks of many others like him; and he, like the rest, must open the doors of his breast anew—and this time wide open—to receive the lessons that time delivers and that the days teach him."

So the man who is truly a man—that is, the master of his own affairs—must make his life processions of victory and triumph; and sufficient for us is what God has bestowed on us of reason, logic, and a living conscience, which serve us as a counselor of sound judgment. This does not mean that our striving should be confined to the hope of fulfilling ambitions of vainglory; for those who labor after glorious deeds for love of glory and fame alone rarely succeed, unless their labor includes selfless devotion in the service of right and truth.