The Broken Things of Life.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17383, 20 April 1928, Page 4

The Broken Things of Life.

“Among the broken things of life one would think first of broken time. Time, says Benjamin Franklin, is the stuff of life: it is a stuff which is very easily tattered. When a man is very eagerly plying his own work, interrogation’s are intensely irritating. Sometimes they are inevitable: at other times they spring from thoughtlessness. And one of the lessons everyone must learn who wants to achieve anything in life is how to hold to tilings through recurring interruption. That is how the worker comes ashore. That is how most of tho world's work is done; not by men of an unbroken leisure — unbroken leisure is evry rarely fruitful. It is done by men who have to seize their hours: rescue and redeem their opportunites: gather up the fragments that remain. . . . They seized their hours, rescued their opportunites, toiled on in the teeth of interruptions, and on broken pieces of the ship they came ashore.

“In the common speech of men, which does not. condescend ou nice distinctions, irony is much confused with sarcasm. As a matter of fact though they overlap occasionally the two are radically different from each other. Sarcasm is a hitter thing. It is almost invariably loveless. It often goes hand in hand with cleverness, hut very seldom with a generous nature. Irony, on the contrary, is more akin to humour than to cleverness, and so betrays a richer, deeper origin. Great souls are not. sarcastic; very frequently they are ironical. Sarcasm is commonly a mask to hide the feelings of inferiority. Irony, like its begetting humour, never conceals conscious inferiority; it carries with it some consciousness of triumph. True, it may be very stern sometimes, but love also may he very stern. . . . Love does not belittle irony as one of the lesser weapons of its armoury, while sarcasm it utterly abhors.’’ The above are passages from two chapters in Dr. George H. Morrison’s new book, “The Gateways of the Stars. ” . ....