The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [47]
15. Which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure from need.
16. The first task is to win something; the second, to banish the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden.
17. Surely, human life is a mistake. Man is a compound of needs and necessities which are hard to satisfy,
18. And even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but the danger of boredom.
19. This is proof that existence has no value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life?
20. If life – the craving for which is the very essence of our being – had intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom:
21. Existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
22. But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something;
23. And then distance and difficulties to be overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us: an illusion which vanishes when we reach it.
24. When we are not occupied by thought or striving, when we cast upon existence itself,
25. Its vain and worthless nature is brought home to us; and this is the essence of nullity.
26. If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole,
27. And the generations of people as they live their little hour of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession;
28. If we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it seems!
29. It is like a drop of water under a microscope, a single drop teeming with small things; or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye.
30. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another in so tiny a space!
31. And whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity is merely comic.
32. It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of time and space.
Chapter 10
1. Unless suffering is the object of life, our existence must entirely fail in its aim.
2. It is absurd to look upon the pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all.
3. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.
4. We find pleasure not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and we find pain much more painful.
5. We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
6. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil that might presently be in store for us – sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason.
7. No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath,
8. But always coming after us, a taskmaster with a whip.
9. If at any moment time stays its hand, it is only when we are delivered over to misery.
10. But misfortune has its uses; for, as our bodily frame would burst if the pressure of the atmosphere was removed,
11. So, if people were relieved of all need and adversity, if everything they undertook were successful, they would go mad.
12. Something of pain and trouble is necessary for everyone at all times: a ship without ballast is unstable and will not sail straight in the sea.
13. Work, worry, labour and trouble form the lot of almost all men all their lives.
14. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? What would they do with the time that would then oppress?
15. In youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised,
16. Eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is fortunate that we do not know what is going to happen.
17. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners,
18. Condemned, not to death,