Essays on Life 



know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously. Life is 

 like playing a violin solo in public and learning 

 the instrument as one goes on. One cannot 

 make the best of such impossibilities, and 

 the question is doubly fatuous until we are 

 told which of our two lives the conscious or 

 the unconscious is held by the asker to be 

 the truer life. Which does the question con- 

 template the life we know, or the life which 

 others may know, but which we know not ? 



Death gives a life to some men and women 

 compared with which their so-called existence 

 here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of 

 Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who 

 wrote the " Odyssey," and of Jane Austen 

 the life which palpitated with sensible warm 

 motion within their own bodies, or that in 

 virtue of which they are still palpitating in 

 ours ? In whose consciousness does their 

 truest life consist their own, or ours ? Can 

 Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life 

 till a hundred years or so after he was dead 

 and buried ? His physical life was but as an 

 embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, 



a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that 



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