The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [43]
10. At the road’s end lie certainties of age and death; even from our first setting out we are beset.
11. What is the life of man and woman, but labour and vexation, and an ever-uncertain future?
12. What is the truth that accompanies life, other than that we must endure if we make no end before the end?
13. By hope we live, and by reliefs: best in the conversation of a friend, worst in a pot of liquor; but only the ultimate relief of death relieves all.
14. What is hope, but the illusion of possible good: for hope prolongs torments, yet offers itself as their only medicine.
15. No one would be sick, or captive, bereft or bereaved, unloved or a failure, a victim or a scapegoat, lonely or afraid:
16. Yet how rare is he who is not one or more of these at some time, passing as mankind must between the millstones of the months and years?
17. It is vain to comfort the grieving, for grief must have its fill;
18. Like the ashes of roses, or the roses’ shadows, that alone remain when their petals have blown, and litter the path behind.
Chapter 2
1. All that seems new is nothing but what the past has forgotten.
2. All things have been tossed on the seas of time; some submerge, then are cast up again as novelty,
3. Some drown and are lost for ever that were for mankind’s good, and some whose loss is for mankind’s benefit.
4. So it is that envy and malice, and the cruelty and rapine of human to human, always seem of the times, but have been the coin of their exchange for ever.
5. Sects and factions, divisions and quarrels, unforgiving separations of brother and brother, appear as today’s problems: but are older than amity.
6. What is it that troubles our sleep, but the pangs of bitterness for what happened yesterday, and the fear that tomorrow will bring the same.
7. It is the weight on the heart that presses out an acid lees, tainting all we drink for our burning thirst.
8. Nothing begins or ends without this: that life starts in another’s pain, and ends in our own.
9. Nothing is understood for its worth, until stolen away; making us poor, and the world a wilderness.
10. The brief, effortful, confused span of existence between two nothings, burdened with care and trial, is a tale traced on water, a story written in dust.
11. It is a wild theme, rife with sorrow, an empty theme, deformed with grief,
12. A dark theme, full of falsehood, under a biting and bitter sky.
13. Why live? Why live on? What is there that tomorrow promises so faithfully that yesterday has not hurt us with already?
14. And they give answer who say: deceitful hope, that makes us continue into the narrowing corridor of the windowless future, as if it led to a garden.
Chapter 3
1. I have followed the bier to that opened oblong of earth, have heard the small rain fall on it, and felt my tears choking my throat and stinging my eyes,
2. Even in the cold and grey of the funeral day I have felt the tears coursing on my cheeks.
3. Why? Why? There are holes in the world, where she was, and where the unspoken words of kindness and love wait still to be said, but to the vacancy of the unretrievable past.
4. Now the anger and silences, the misunderstandings and missed opportunities, grow so large that they overshadow the larger seasons of happiness, and blight them;
5. At the last there was no time to undo the wrongs that were left, and with a final kiss to forgive, and establish the best parts of our love as its monument.
6. The threnody of all loves devoured by ravenous time is ‘I wish, I wish’; yet this inevitability makes no difference to what we do beforehand:
7. It is as if we say, in our folly and our ignorance or forgetfulness, ‘We have eternity, therefore I will be angry.’
8. But there are no eternities other than grief while it lasts, no certainties other than that grief must come, no escape other than from life itself and what it asks us to endure.
9. I have followed the bier to opened oblongs of earth more than once now, as the years accumulate and the tired