The Wanganui Chronicle. FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1928. THE REFUGE OF THE BEATEN MAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20149, 18 May 1928, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle. FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1928. THE REFUGE OF THE BEATEN MAN

4<j|jAN’S life is a bubble clinging to a reed.” To all mca of clear vision and of imagination lhat thought, which comprises the brevity and the apparent, futility of life, comes sooner or later. The illusions of youth depart, the ego faces facts, and declares with Solomon that “all is vanity.”

From this doldrums of mental life the strong-fibred ego emerges with a philosophy of resignation. Watching the pageant of birth and youth and love and death, the follies of men; enjoying the solace of the written word and the music of strings, its interest docs not flag. “Bloody, but unbowed,” it faees the burden of life.

But the weaker individuality can no longer support this burden. The weak man is beaten. Death cannot be duller than life, or more miserable; come, then death! Suicide is always the refuge of the beaten man. It may take a certain nervous courage to “quietus make with a bare bodkin,” but at times it takes a greater courage to face life, when all that has made life fair is taken, and there seems no prospect of new interests.

When a man is young he is able to piece together new illusions and dreams out of the shattered fragments of old ones. As he grows older this faculty departs. He has lived all life’s experiences, known all life’s sensations, recognised romantie love, and hope, and ambition for what they are, and settled down to the quieter pleasures of advancing age. Then, one by one, these are taken. Death sunders his companionships, pains unknown to youth rock his body. He learns a resignation which all of us must admire, and faces the end with a calmness not possible to youth. Still, he does not seek it of his own act. He is content to wait. Life has not beaten him. To sustain man against the cold pressure of the eternities of time and space in which he finds himself he must have either the hope which religion gives him, or the resignation which comes from philosophy, and which enables him to laugh at the powers which tread him down. Without these two palliatives man would, sooner or later, looking forward to a time when by the cooling of the sun, he and his works will have perished from the earth, solve that “insolence” not by wine, as Omar suggests, but by mass suicide.