Rarely, in the days of our youth, do the symptoms of the "will to fail" show themselves in our souls; so we explain our shrinking from setting out into the battle of life as the shyness of the raw beginner, or, if we have never once tried to put forth our utmost effort in our work, we invent for ourselves the excuse that the work we happened upon — when there was no escape from setting out to earn a living — is not the work for which we were altogether suited. And the difficulty grows worse if we marry and become heads of families: it may well be within our power to endure hardship and harm for a few years, but to ask your dependents to be patient as you are patient — that is a matter requiring a courage which many of us may not possess.

A Kerosene Table Lamp — Bardawil & Co.

A table lamp that runs on kerosene

Agents: Bardawil & Co.

Beirut — Tripoli Street

at the end of Souk al-Tawileh

Telephone 82-0-8

Often we resolve at the outset that the intended goal shall never slip from our sight — but our exhausting work claims most of the hours of the day, and no wonder the strength we then require is a strength beyond human capacity: to bear seeing oneself drowned in work while all the rest of the world amuses itself and plays, and when no gleam appears before our eyes promising success if we persevere. And so we drop behind — without being aware of it — from the procession of life, without taking our share in it, without our talents unfolding what they enfold, and without our expending even a small part of our capacity. Then, if we manage to arrange for ourselves a livelihood with some ease in it, and to win a little respect and admiration, or an intoxication of power that we taste for an hour and that soon passes, and to enjoy a little love, we reckon that we have carried off a profitable bargain from life; indeed it may go so far that we congratulate ourselves on our superiority without ever suspecting that we are among the deceived.

Among the maxims handed down from "Marcus Aurelius," the famous Roman emperor, is his saying to himself, in warning: "Do not conduct yourself as one who imagines he will live a thousand years." And wherever we turn we see harsh, naked omens saying: "The time has passed while you were heedless." Yet everyone who falls into the grip of the will to fail spends the most precious hours of his life as though he had an inexhaustible spring of time. There are, for instance, people who spend several hours in sleep beyond the measure that guarantees them full health and soundness, and there are people whose waking differs in nothing from deep slumber, for they are

absorbed in pursuits that embody laziness and the killing of time: like that vast army of café fixtures who spend their hours playing cards and backgammon and dominoes, or amusing themselves by reviewing the passersby, and among them the one who sits alone, vacant-eyed, yawning or dreaming; like those infatuated with solving riddles and crossword puzzles; and like the man who has accustomed himself to sit shut up in his house reading everything that reaches his hand without direction or discrimination, until reading has become in him a disease of which no cure can be hoped.

There is a clear difference between recreation of the spirit and its blind surrender to such pursuits, and it is not difficult for us to see this difference if we attend to its existence. Nor should you forget the frequenters of the theaters, the devotees of the cinema and the horse races, those infatuated with the exchange of visits and with talk in gatherings that is all chatter, and those who, if they are not invited to a dance or a tea party, count that day as lost from their lives.

And the will to fail preys upon us by methods baser, lower, and more hidden than these. Consider, for example, the case of that great number of people who deliberately content themselves with an easy job that demands of them only a small portion of their capacity, and then create for it trivial details and immerse themselves in them until exhaustion overtakes them. Consider those who never cease beginning to prepare for higher degrees; and consider those young men who spend most of their hours in the corners of houses of ill fame; and consider, too, those sons and daughters and mothers who