i
I imagine that life can give nothing much better or much worse than what
I have myself experienced. I should say I had proved pretty well the
extremes of mental pleasure and pain; and so I believe each in his own
way does, almost every man.
ii
I have squandered my life as a schoolboy squanders a tip. But then half,
or more than half the fun a schoolboy gets out of a tip consists in the
mere fact of having something to squander. Squandering is in itself
delightful, and so I found it with my life in my younger days. I do not
squander it now, but I am not sorry that I have squandered a good deal of
it. What a heap of rubbish there would have been if I had not! Had I
not better set about squandering what is left of it?