Allah be praised for a leisurely life! I have been visiting A. R. D.,
whose days are filled with large and various activities; whose
responsibilities are great; whose hours of work are long; of leisure few
and scanty. I admire such indomitable workers, with an admiration which
increases with every year I live, but I envy them, Oh ye gods, not at
all!
“Cling to the peace of obscurity; they shall be happy that love thee.”
Where, I wonder, have I acquired that rather ignominious injunction?
There is a seventeenth-century flavour about it which makes it sound
respectable, yet at bottom I suppose it is merely a counsel of laziness.
Work, far from the curse, is the alleviation of the curse; of that I am
as convinced as anybody. At the same time a good deal of the work that
goes on around one seems to be rather the product of the unasked
volition of the worker, than of any violent external necessity.
Obscurity and laziness moreover are far from interchangeable terms,
seeing that the majority of the hard-workers of the world are, and as a
necessity always will be, obscure. It is only in our little fussy
artistic or literary coteries that the two ideas have attained to a sort
of accidental connection. Personally I have a relish, I might almost say
a passion for obscurity. The retort is of course easy, and I am able to
reply to myself that the alternative has never been pressed upon my
attention with any very urgent insistence. That is true, but does not
really affect the matter. Honestly, I do regard obscurity as a blessing,
apart from such satisfactions it may provide for laziness. For what does
it mean? It means that you belong to yourself; that you have your years,
your days, hours, and minutes undisposed of, unbargained for, unwatched,
and unwished for by anybody. It means that you are free to go in and out
without witnesses; free as the grass, free rather as the birds of the
air. Further, I am inclined to think that only Obscurity can properly
and heartily enjoy his sunsets, moon-rises, spring mornings, running
streams, first flowers, and all the rest of the good cheap joys that lie
about his path. The known and admired person is expected to make capital
out of such matters, and he probably does so too, poor fellow! Yet upon
the untrammelled enjoyment of such things how much, not only of the
satisfaction, but of the peace of life depends? As was said by
one--who, by the way, was very far himself from being an
Obscurity--“Nothing startles me beyond the moment. A setting sun will
always set me to rights, and if a sparrow comes hopping to my window, I
can take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel.”