I was struck, the other day, by the name of a play on a theatre
poster: _A Life of Pleasure_. The expression is so familiar that we
hear and employ it without thinking how it has come to be. Yet, when
by some accident it comes to be analysed, its meaning startles with an
odd revelation. Pleasure, a life of pleasure.... Other lives, to be
livable, must contain more pleasure than pain; and we know, as a fact,
that all healthy work is pleasurable to healthy creatures. Intelligent
converse with one's friends, study, sympathy, all give pleasure; and
art is, in a way, the very type of pleasure. Yet we know that none of
all that is meant in the expression: a life of pleasure. A curious
thought, and, as it came to me, a terrible one. For that expression is
symbolic. It means that, of all the myriads of creatures who surround
us, in the present and past, the vast majority identifies pleasure
mainly with such a life; despises, in its speech at least, all other
sorts of pleasure, the pleasure of its own honest strivings and
affections, taking them for granted, making light thereof.