We consider the cells which are born and die within us yearly to have
been sufficiently honoured [sic] in having contributed their quotum to
our life; why should we have such difficulty in seeing that a healthy
enjoyment and employment of our life will give us a sufficient reward in
that growth of God wherein we may live more truly and effectually after
death than we have lived when we were conscious of existence? Is Handel
dead when he influences and sets in motion more human beings in three
months now than during the whole, probably, of the years in which he
thought that he was alive? What is being alive if the power to draw men
for many miles in order that they may put themselves en rapport with
him is not being so? True, Handel no longer knows the power which he has
over us, but this is a small matter; he no longer animates six feet of
flesh and blood, but he lives in us as the dead leaf lives in the tree.
He is with God, and God knows him though he knows himself no more.
This should suffice, and I observe in practice does suffice, for all
reasonable persons. It may be said that one day the tree itself must
die, and the leaves no longer live therein; and so, also, that the very
God or Life of the World will one day perish, as all that is born must
surely in the end die. But they who fret upon such grounds as this must
be in so much want of a grievance that it were a cruelty to rob them of
one: if a man who is fond of music tortures himself on the ground that
one day all possible combinations and permutations of sounds will have
been exhausted so that there can be no more new tunes, the only thing
we can do with him is to pity him and leave him; nor is there any better
course than this to take with those idle people who worry themselves
and others on the score that they will one day be unable to remember
the small balance of their lives that they have not already forgotten
as unimportant to them-that they will one day die to the balance of
what they have not already died to. I never knew a well-bred or amiable
person who complained seriously of the fact that he would have to die.
Granted we must all sometimes find ourselves feeling sorry that we
cannot remain for ever at our present age, and that we may die so much
sooner than we like; but these regrets are passing with well-disposed
people, and are a sine qua non for the existence of life at all. For if
people could live for ever so as to suffer from no such regret, there
would be no growth nor development in life; if, on the other hand,
there were no unwillingness to die, people would commit suicide upon the
smallest contradiction, and the race would end in a twelvemonth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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