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All men, inasmuch as they are not liberated from the bondage of time, follow the downward path of history, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. Few, indeed, thoroughly like it, even in our epoch, let alone in happier ages, when people read less and thought more. Few follow it unhesitatingly, without throwing at some time or other a sad glance towards the distant lost paradise towards into which they know, in their deeper consciousness, that they are never to peer; the paradise of perfection in time within so remote that the earliest people of which we know remember it as only a dream. Yet they follow their fate away; they obey their destiny. That resigned submission to the terrible law of decay; that acceptance of the bondage of time by creatures who dimly feel they could be free from it, but who find it too hard to try to free themselves, who know beforehand that they would never succeed, even if they did try, because at the bottom of that incurable unhappiness of man the deplored again and again the Greek tragedies, long before these were written. Man is unhappy because he knows, because he feels, in general, that the world in which he lives, of which he is a part, is not what it should be; not what is could be; not what, in fact, it was at the dawn of time, before decay set in. He cannot wholeheartedly accept the world as his, especially not accept the fact that it is going from bad to worse (be glad). However much he may try to be a realist, and snatch from destiny whatever he can, when he can, still an invincible yearning for the better remains at the bottom of his heart; he cannot, in general stomach the world as it is. |
