This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned
common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation
without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the
moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity
of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this
monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than
those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless
vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning--then next a
dim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom
of waters without a shore--then a few sunny smiles and many tears--a
little love and infinite strife--whisperings from paradise and fierce
mockeries from the anarchy of chaos--dust and ashes--and once more
darkness circling round, as if from the beginning, and in this way
rounding or making an island of our fantastic existence,--_that_
is human life; _that_ the inevitable amount of man's laughter and
his tears--of what he suffers and he does--of his motions this way and
that way--to the right or to the left--backwards or forwards--of all
his seeming realities and all his absolute negations--his shadowy
pomps and his pompous shadows--of whatsoever he thinks, finds, makes
or mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in dread hope
anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for ever and
ever.
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