“To suffer and endure,
To keep the spirit pure—
The fortress and abode of holy Truth—
To serve eternal things
Whate’er the issue brings
This is not broken Age, but ageless Youth.”
If then life be centered on self, old age may rest in the certitude of
disappointment and disillusion. But if self be centered on life, then
may come what Morley described, touching Edmund Burke, as “an
unrebellious temper and hopes undimmed for mankind.”
Twofold must be the hope of man,—for a future for self and for the
future for all. And when the soul is so freighted with hopes, then shall
it be said of a man as it was said of the great poet: “He was one of
those on the lookout for every new idea and for every old idea with a
new application, which may tend to meet the growing requirements of
society; one of those who are like men standing on a watch-tower to whom
others apply and say, not ‘What of the night?’ but ‘What of the morning
and of the coming day?’”
My one word of counsel is,—let life not be centered on self, for to live
for self is to invite cruel disaster in old age. The saddest, in truth
the most tragic, lives I know are those of old men and women who have
nothing to live for because they have lived for self and self alone,—and
self is nothing. Their lives are piteously empty. For the restlessness
and excitement of youth may hide this truth, but age, like death, is a
revealer. And there are many types of selfishness. I speak of two which
must suffice. There are those who live for self,—for selfissimus, giving
not the utmost for the highest but all for the nighest,—self, self,
self, self’s pleasure and profit and power and vantage and fame. These
are the most crude and obvious types of the selfful, who shall pay the
penalty of their folly and their moral disease.
But, though it be said to your dismay, there are other types of
selfishness, though less obvious,—the selfishness of those who project
self into and magnify self in family relationship. For there are those
who simply extend the horizon of self enough to include other forms of
self, one’s own, one’s nearest, one’s flesh and blood. And here, too,
disillusion is bound to come and ought to come, for one’s own cannot and
ought not to fill one’s life forever. One might well excuse our mothers
and fathers for giving their thought and attention to their own, for
these were many and life was hard and life’s struggle ofttimes bitter.
But for the fewest is such excuse valid now,—if ever it was
valid—especially seeing that we concentrate upon the giving to others of
things rather than upon helping others to their highest and best. In
truth, people concentrate upon self, upon their own interests and
wishes, and these things pass and little or nothing is left in life save
self. Live for yourself, and you live two years in one; live in the life
of others, and you divide your years with another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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