The correlation is shown in defects. Möller, in his Essay on
Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to
answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not
been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather
virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in the
argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and
handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the hump would be seen. If a man
has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his
poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his
charity. And, as every man is hunted by his own dæmon, vexed by his own
disease, this checks all his activity.
So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent,
bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that
fret my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, knife-worms: a
swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth,
plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.
This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are
there, thought can follow and show them. Especially when a soul is
quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,
"Or if the soul of proper kind
Be so perfect as men find,
That it wot what is to come,
And that he warneth all and some
Of every of their aventures,
By previsions or figures;
But that our flesh hath not might
It to understand aright
For it is warned too darkly."—
Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and
presage: they meet the person they seek; what their companion prepares
to say to them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them
of what is about to befall.
Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the design this
vagabond life admits. We wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet
year after year we find two men, two women, without legal or carnal tie,
spend a great part of their best time within a few feet of each other.
And the moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from
flees from us; as Goethe said, "what we wish for in youth, comes in
heaps on us in old age," too often cursed with the granting of our
prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having
what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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