There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary descant upon athorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met, now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought that this is life.To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle.
There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary descant upon athorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met, now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought that this is life.
To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle.