THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3829, 4 November 1936, Page 8

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

“The dead are privileged,” writes M. Maeterlinck in his new bool;, “The Hour Glass.” “We forget • their faults; we remember only the things that would excuse them, and we exaggerate only their good qualities. Even tile posthumous discovery of errors, vices, betrayals and villainies, passes almost unnoticed; it seems impossible to hold the dead responsible for things which wou!d have confounded them utterly had they been alive. We begin to love them sincerely, faihtfully, profoundly, only when they are no more. “Why do we not behave to the living as we do to the dead? If we did, life would be beautiful; easy, pleasant, smiling. But we have never done so. Must we conclude that it is impossible? “We never suspect .that the loss of a friend for whom we had only a

passing affection will leave a gap that nothing will ever fill. “We always regret that we have not known more of those whom we love. It seems that they show themselves as they are only at the moment when they cease to be. But if they were to return they would lose in a moment all that death has given them. “Unlike the living, who lose it so easily, the dead retain our affection until we, too, are no more.”