"Don't growl at the poor translation; its a hasty improvisation which I ventured upon because I know you can't bear French. The sense is faithfully rendered, and it's a sense admirably suited to the senseless. I know of but one way that leads to real unhappiness, and that's when a person is vain and frivolous. And those lines contain much wisdom for it is just those people who lack the strength to endure sorrowful recollections of the past and anxiety concerning their futures, that are so deeply indebted to Nature for the ability of thoughtlessly and unconsciously enjoying their pitiful present. This will not bring them happiness, it will only make them less miserable, for the real bliss of living they will never learn to know. He only can understand that who is capable of quiet reflection, or, if you will, who is able to grasp the meaning of both past and future at once. Perhaps, though you're exactly the opposite of vain and frivolous, even you won't wholly understand life for a long time as I've understood it. I have always been best able to enjoy life by retrospection; and whenever I wished to thoroughly enjoy existence, I have only needed to awake in myself a vivid remembrance of the various periods of my life; of my laughing frolicsome childhood, when I was in the glow of perfect health; then the first dawn of thought and feeling, the first sorrows of youth, when they came to me, the perception of what a full, healthful existence must be, and yet at the same time the resignation to my fate which is usually easy only to men advanced in years. Don't you believe that one, who can experience whenever he wishes such a fullness of life in himself, to whom for this purpose everything lends its aid, sorrow and joy, loss and gain, each showing him a new side of his own nature--don't you believe, my dear fellow, that such a fortunate man must consider it a mistaken conclusion, even if a philosopher gave it utterance, it would be better not to be born. To be sure, no one can deny that there are times when sorrow stifles the desire for existence and excites an overwhelming longing for mere unconsciousness? But oftentimes the greatest sorrow brings an increase of our life experience; how could we otherwise understand the triumphant delight which martyrs have felt under torture by fire and rack. They felt that their torment only confirmed their confidence in the strength of their own souls, pervaded as they were by an illusion or a truth that their tormentors sought to tear out or kill. The worst that could be inflicted upon them served to develope the highest enjoyment of their personality. And so all the tragedy of life which a shallow philosophy pronounces to be the misery of the world, is merely another, higher form of enjoying life peculiar to lofty souls. When death steps in at last, it's like the sleep that comes after a holiday, when people have been so long in an ecstacy of delight that they are