The question, therefore, on which I have undertaken to address you
is, as you must all know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously. Life
is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument
as one goes on. One cannot make the best of such impossibilities,
and the question is doubly fatuous until we are told which of our
two lives--the conscious or the unconscious--is held by the asker to
be the truer life. Which does the question contemplate--the life we
know, or the life which others may know, but which we know not?
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their
so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of
Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the Odyssey, and of
Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion
within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still
palpitating in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life
consist--their own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun
his true life till a hundred years or so after he was dead and
buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming
up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that
life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter.
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