The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [338]
22. Gentle in manner, strong in mind, a good proponent of the smaller graces and accomplishments as well as of the greater accomplishments they support:
23. Such I would have you, my son, and I commend these lessons to you for your greater benefit and happiness.
The Good
Chapter 1
1. There is a time when nothing is said or thought, but only felt or tasted: the time when the object of happiness is happiness itself.
2. Then one rises with the sun and is happy, one goes walking and is happy, one sees the faces of one’s family and is happy.
3. One wanders in the woods and fields and along the hillsides, and is happy; one reads or idles in the sun, and is happy;
4. One picks the fruit or takes water to the flower beds, and is happy; and happiness follows one everywhere.
5. When is this? In the safety of childhood in a country of wealth and peace;
6. With health and leisure, and parents to love one, and quiet nights for sleep;
7. When we have driven away all that troubles or frightens us, there is tranquillity and freedom.
8. Then comes a boundless joy that endures, then comes harmony of mind with nobility and kindliness, for it is only from weakness that evil is born.
9. And yet, the troubled man will see these words and say: ‘You speak here only of the idyll of a thoughtless child. Childhood is brief, and few places wholly safe;
10. ‘Life is otherwise than such idealism paints it. Its truths are hard, and inevitable:
11. ‘And these truths are that we suffer, that our lot is to lose and to grieve, and finally to undergo the pain of dying before the release of death.
12. ‘What we must learn is how to endure, how to accept, how to keep our dignity despite the assaults of frailty, of misfortune, and the malice of man.’
13. Alas: there is indeed suffering, frailty and malice; and there are the ill chances that bring or worsen all three. And yet still, the good is possible.
14. The first step of the good life is to seek wisdom and give up fear.
15. Wisdom teaches what is worthwhile and what is illusory.
16. It brings proportion and measure, it dispenses with the false glare cast by human vanity and cupidity, by fashion, falsehood, ignorance and folly.
17. The fear that hampers life is the fear of loss, especially the ultimate loss that is death.
18. Death has two faces: one’s own death, and the death of those we love. Wisdom looks into the eyes of each face and sees there what it must.
19. What is it to die? It is to return to the elements, to continue as part of the whole but in a different way.
20. Now we are a living unity, then we will be changed into something diffuse and organic, part of nature no less than we are now, and no less than we always were before our present form.
21. Thus the components of our substance exist for ever, coeval with the universe, made in the stars and in an endless dance with other elements, constituted and reconstituted throughout time by nature’s laws.
22. Though we cease as we now are, what we are never ceases. We are part of the whole, and always so.
23. History cannot shed us from its annals any more than nature can annihilate the particles of our being from its scheme.
24. We are for ever part of what is, indelible, written in the record of nature and the human story, whatever our part or place.
25. For the time we have this shape and this consciousness of its possession, let us be worthy of it.
Chapter 2
1. It is in the death of others that our deepest grief and greatest loss comes.
2. From the viewpoint of our brief and local lives we do not see the loss as change only, or as a returning: rather, it strikes us with the iron of grief.
3. To live is to have a contract with loss. The past eludes us, and carries away what we valued;
4. Some of those we love will surely die before we do, and we will mourn them.
5. For this we must have courage; necessity is hard, so we must accept what is inevitable and unavoidable, and endure.
6. Thus far