The letters of Charles Eliot Norton have lately been published, and the time is opportune for a lesson from that good man’s life. Though always physically frail, he lived to be over eighty, and got more out of his life, and gave more from it, than do most robust men, even when they have his rare degree of intellect. Some who knew him well, say that one great secret of his long life of helpfulness and happiness was that he never had the blues.
While men like Norton make cheerfulness a religion, many other people of very good intentions do not even recognize it as a duty, but grope, and drag others, through clouded lives, while the clouds are generally of their own permitting, and not seldom of their own making. They are often thoughtful people, but not thoughtful enough to realize how much happiness and usefulness are wasted by the habit of the blues, or how easily that habit can be overcome. They sometimes even indulge it from a notion that depression of spirit is synonymous with depth of spirit, not realizing how often black waters set up a very abysmal appearance in a chasm so shallow that if a man clinging to the edge would only let go, he could touch bottom without submerging his chin. But if he delights in what he assumes to be the gloomy depths of his soul, he does not want to let go: he wants to believe his own puddle deep, and hates nothing worse than the possibility that it may be shallow, just as nothing so enrages the insane as the suggestion that they are insane.
Really superior persons (without capitals or quotation marks) are sometimes superior because of superior sensibility, though oftener, I suspect, in spite of it; and sometimes because of superior morality. Upon such peoplethe shortcomings of life—especially of human nature, weigh harder than upon common folks. It was by no means Carlyle’s dyspepsia alone that kept him grumbling all the while, and that, but for his sense of humor, would have killed him long before his time. Then, too, superior people often have superior imaginations, and often abuse them by imagining horrible things, and suffering more from them than the clod suffers from realities.
Moreover, people with sensibilities and imaginations are apt to be queer in their morals: they may have too few, because sensitiveness and imagination breed passions, and are inimical to the philosophy, as well as the plain common-sense, that regulate passions; or they may have too many morals, because sensitiveness makes them hate the ugly consequences of immorality worse than the rest of us can, and also because, where Hell is in fashion, if it still is anywhere, they imagine it so much more vividly, and shrink from it so much more vigorously than the rest of us can, that they get New England consciences. Worse still, that kind of superior person with too few morals to do business with, or too many, is subject to insufficient food and clothing, and to poor quarters and inefficient medical care—to being sick, in short; and deprivation and sickness very naturally bring on the blues; and last of all, sensitiveness and imagination and too many morals and too few comforts, and sickness do not develop a sense of humor. The poet or the tragedian in the black frock-coat buttoned up to hide the absence of the shirt, is not half so funny to himself as to us.
In giving so many of the reasons why people who make great and beautiful things are apt to have the blues, I have run along the edge of platitude, and occasionally, I fear, slipped over, because I want to emphasize the fact that there is no warrant for the fallacy nursed by so many would-be troubled souls, that having the blues will enable them to make great and beautiful things, and that because Carlyle and Poe had the blues, your or myhaving them is evidence that ours have the same causes as theirs or will be accompanied by the same results.
And there are several other things tending the same way which we had better put an end to. Depression of spirits is not as often the result of vanity, or over-sensibility or any other form of weak wits, as it is of weak nerves or weak liver. And yet all these weaknesses are generally inextricably mixed as cause and effect. If without any real cause of worry, you wake up two or three consecutive mornings feeling that the world is an unsatisfactory place, probably you had better go to the doctor. He won’t be apt to give you anything worse than rhubarb and soda. You might even try them before going; and if it is a sunny day, try to glory in it, out of doors if possible; and if it is a rainy day, try to think how cozy it will be by the fire, or if you have to go to an office, how good it will be to have a day for steady work, when clients and customers are not apt to come in.
I wish I felt sure that the doctor would make you realize that we need healthy emotional pickers and stealers just as much as we need healthy physical ones. Overstrain and undersleep will make the world appear an empty place, simply because the nerves won’t pick up the good things in it. Hence the listlessness apt to follow happiness, when happiness is great enough to fatigue. Hence people on honeymoons sometimes having entirely baseless suspicions that they don’t love as much as they supposed they did. Hence, too, no end of texts for temperance.
The bacteria of the blues of course always seize on a favorable culture medium. Probably the best of such media is a settled and exaggerated consciousness of the possibility of disaster, which soon becomes magnified into a probability. Some people feel as if they were always treading on a thin crust over a volcano. Your doctor can do a good deal for one cause of that. The other causeis what Bacon called defective enumeration—generalizing from the remarkable, instead of the usual—the most frequent of all fallacies. Hundreds of people can be killed in automobiling without your considering it more dangerous than other sports, but as soon as somebody very near to you is killed, you think the sport dangerous. Now as to danger in general, think of the facts. At any moment, perhaps one person in five hundred actually is in danger of disease or other misfortune. But the remaining four hundred and ninety-nine are not, except in the distorted imagination of far too large a proportion of them. There’s a big chance—perhaps one in three or four, that you who read these lines, being a person who lives not merely on the surface of things, are in the habit of letting your imagination play too much with what is under the surface. Now stop it! Youmayof course be actually the victim of ill fortune; but even if you are, there’s a chance that, in compensation, you have been made a saint by it, and that you really get more out of life than do most people more happily situated: for that’s the way of saints, as you can tell by looking at their serene expression.
True, a few terrible disasters must be expected, but they are generally so much like surgical operations that, unless they are fatal, the character recovers with some of its evil elements removed. And most strange to say, outside of character, and merely in relations to the external world—to wealth, opportunity, friendship,—the very worst disasters are often blessings in disguise. It pays as well to seek for the bright side of our miseries, as it does to count our mercies. “Count yo’ mahcies, Honey, count yo’ mahcies!” recommended the old colored auntie. You will remember it in that shape.
I have heard one of my ink-diffusing friends confess that having had an infirmity that interfered with his sleep, he long grieved over it as lessening his production. But at last he realized that the sleeplessness had enforcedeconomy of time, in which, before the infirmity, he had been sadly lacking, and that his waking hours, in the undisturbed night, had bred the best of the thoughts which have contributed to his share of fame and fortune, and to the philosophy which secures his happiness.
But the realization of hidden blessings in misfortunes to ourselves generally requires a long experience: so let us take a case concerning everybody. It is not long since the civilized world experienced from the earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria, a thrill of moral stimulus probably the most intense it ever knew.
At first, on reading of such widespread and merciless destruction—maiming, killing, starving, roasting of children to death before the eyes of pinioned mothers, mothers pinioned before strong sons also pinioned from helping; large communities destroyed, and the survivors driven mad; horror piled on horror until the mere reader suffers, the imagination shrinks back miserable and incapable, and the mind loses faith in a beneficent cause and control of the universe. But after the first intense revolt of feeling has spent itself, and the reason attempts calmly to estimate the evil and what there may be of resultant good, the preponderance of the good, even in such an extreme case, may not seem impossible. The disaster evoked a universal burst of charity that turned fleets of battleships into engines of mercy. The moral advantage to humanity was colossal—nothing less than a distinct injection of kindness into all the relations of men.
It involved the death of but one in hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of the civilized world. Most of the survivors received distinct moral benefits, not to speak of the advantage to future generations from the effect on the moral quality of the race.
Moreover, the case cannot be justly put without noting that the sufferers were of a people notoriously lawless (the Northern Italians are reported to have said: “After all, they’re nothing but Calabrians and Sicilians”), andthat the survivors received a powerful call to righteousness.
But reason on them as we may, and get from them what moral good we can, great tragedies tend to breed a terrible uncertainty regarding the stability and goodness of life—and indeed of the universe and the moral law. Yet though much uncertainty is very apt to start from great troubles, it is by no means sure to wait for them. This skepticism is the bottom horror. I have wondered if Sill was thinking of it when, in his poem “Truth at Last” about the Alpine guide hurled down by the snow slide, he asks:
Did he for just one heart-throb—did he indeedKnow with certainty, as they swept onward,There was the end....’Tis something if at last,Though only for a flash, a man may seeClear-eyed the future as he sees the past,From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.
Did he for just one heart-throb—did he indeedKnow with certainty, as they swept onward,There was the end....’Tis something if at last,Though only for a flash, a man may seeClear-eyed the future as he sees the past,From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.
Did he for just one heart-throb—did he indeedKnow with certainty, as they swept onward,There was the end....’Tis something if at last,Though only for a flash, a man may seeClear-eyed the future as he sees the past,From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.
Did he for just one heart-throb—did he indeed
Know with certainty, as they swept onward,
There was the end....
’Tis something if at last,
Though only for a flash, a man may see
Clear-eyed the future as he sees the past,
From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.
Did Sill mean that even death may be preferable to that haunting uncertainty which is the worst of the blues? Early in life he had more than his share of it, but he lived it down.
If any man can look on birds and flowers and most women and children and some men, and upon the manifold beauties of earth and sea and sky, from dawn on to dawn, if any man can realize that we might have been driven by pain more effectively than even attracted by pleasure, to feed ourselves and reproduce ourselves—if any man can see these things, and not be certain that behind the universe there is intention, and effective intention, to produce happiness, that man simply has, at least temporarily, an abnormal mind. But he is the very kind of man who gets the blues. All that can be done for him is to help him see the other side of the shield. As for mere argument, sometimes one might almost as well use it against paresis as against pessimism.
Neither can much be done for fools. But there are degrees and kinds of fools. The worst are probably those who, having committed a folly of lasting consequences, sulk over it instead of facing it cheerfully and trying to make the best of it. When we can’t get happiness, we can at least get discipline. But the hopeless thing about a fool is that he can never be convinced that he is one: his follies are always in the past tense.
Next to doubting too much, is expecting too much. Aside from the few great disasters of a lifetime, the worst things are proverbially those that never happen. This paper has not much to say about things thatdohappen. They may involve feelings not to be remonstrated against, or even mentioned lightly. But still those feelings, often very sacred, should, like everything else, be limited to their proper range. The chief cause (and the chief consequence) of the blues areborrowedtroubles. One of the most effective ways of borrowing them is to take for granted that a bad situation will not right itself, and then, instead of merely taking care of the immediate issue, letting the imagination work at all possible issues, and devising means of taking care of them. This is often promoted by a mistaken notion that such constant thought over the matter is a duty—that if the worst comes, one will at least have done one’s best. Generally one’s best really is to drop the subject. But that is not so easy. Just as the tongue always seeks the uneasy tooth, so the mind always seeks the uneasy question. But the tooth is not always under control, and the question generally is, or ought to be. Rigid discipline will develop a habit of leaving it alone except as something can be done about it. The true method generally is to decide what the moment admits of, and then to await the next real occasion for decision, and meanwhile to keep the mind occupied with other things. Usually thought between times is worse than wasted. An occasion when it is not, is usually not between times, but one of the times. Of course one doesnot want to be taken unawares, but not a tithe of the imagined situations ever occur, and those actually to be met are often not foreseen at all: so most of the devising is wasted, attention is distracted from the immediate requirements of life, and time is spent in a continuous overshadowing of the blues. All this takes tissue, and when the next issue comes, the power to meet it is dulled. The strength of the great fighters—generals, lawyers, parliamentarians, depends largely on temperaments which preserve them from such waste of their powers. “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but one,” and exaggerated anticipation of evil is simply cowardice.
Akin to doing work that never is called for, is over-refinement in needed work. True, “perfection consists in trifles,” but don’t forget that “trifles can’t make perfection.” There comes a point beyond which the most conscientious workman can really do no more. Part of the equipment of a true artist is the capacity to recognize that point. After every essential thing is done, there remain non-essentials which may as well go one way as the other. They raise the hardest questions, if they are permitted to raise any, because they are as nearly balanced as the load of Burridon’s ass. Moiling over them is threshing straw: it leads to no result but fatigue and monomania. Monomania is generally the first step in insanity, and nearly every step in insanity is attended by the blues.
But objections to superfluous work and over-refined work, are not objections to hard work, especially when one is in trouble. Carlyle says (I quote from memory): “To him who can earnestly and truly work, there is no need for despair.” But that advice is generally superfluous for an American. He is more apt to need advice to play hard—to mount his hobby or get hold of a new one, and ride it hard.
It is especially bad to let the mind run on worries at night; and to take them to bed with one is madness. This is a special reason for seeking society or the theatre: other people, in real life or on the stage (better in real life, of course, because there one has to talk back) can best pull one out of oneself when one’s own powers are utterly inadequate. When actual causes of anxiety seem overwhelming, if one can be made to forget them for a time, hope comes into the ascendant.
One most important point is that worries are apt to settle themselves during sleep. There may be a subconscious mental action, or one may wake up with the thinking powers invigorated; but whatever the reason may be, people go to bed in perplexity, and soon after waking, do certainly often find that all the considerations have slipped into their relative places, and that the perplexity has cleared.
The best of all remedies is perhaps the most difficult, though not impossible. It is to “rise superior” to your troubles—to convince yourself, lift yourself, force yourself into the feeling of directorship—of competent and confident directorship of all your affairs. Add “with God’s help” if you want to: for that may back up our worthy intentions more even than our ancestors began to realize—whatever they professed to believe. This feeling of calm adequacy does much tosecureadequacy, and what is of perhaps more importance, compels peace.
But adequacy is only adequacy to do the best that circumstances permit. To attempt more than circumstances permit is at once inadequacy—to put yourself on the weak side of a false equation. Attempt only what you can do, and you never need fail. Yet unless you attempt the best you can do, you do fail—fail just so far as the difference between the actual and the best possible. But if you are reasonably brave and wise, that difference will be slight; and the healthy conscience, like the law, takes no account of trifles.
Shoot your arrow at the sun, and hitch your wagon to a star, all you want to—as religious exercise; but in your daily work shoot only when game is within range, and hitch only to something which will hold tight, and is reasonably sure to draw.
And don’t be misled by shrewd Yankees who make divine phrases, but who regulate their actions in daily life as cannily as other Yankees who never make phrases at all.
Absence of work, and no less absence of play,—the mere opportunity to brood, is dangerous to those subject to the blues. When we are in the busy haunts of men, their activity inspires ours, and keeps our thoughts away from introspection and baleful notions; but if we are alone, even with Nature in her loveliest aspects, the mind is apt to seek the profundities, and to drag the spirits with it.
Interest in this subject has brought me some confidences. I knew a man beyond middle life, who had long longed for more opportunities of study and meditation. At last he obtained the cherished desire in the most desired way—in a lovely home amid the loveliest scenery. He took three solid months of it, and found himself low-spirited, ailing, and in need of tonics. But when he was called to the city, the first time he walked down Fifth Avenue, he felt that he didn’t need any other tonic. Yet the habit of years had put him, all unconsciously, in chronic need of that one. He took it at monthly intervals, and it did its work. But it cost time. As he approached old age, he realized in himself a tendency to melancholy, that, in spite of the city life that had been efficacious for himself, had given the declining years of one of his parents much unhappiness. He was frightened: he felt that external aid, like all tonics, must lose its effect in time; and so he worked hard to develop powers in himself that would put him above the need of it. After a few years, circumstances led again to three months away from the city, and so effectually had he enlightened andtrained himself that it was a period of greater cheerfulness, health and fruitfulness than he had ever known.
His bottom principle was: “Kill the thing at the start. Watch! As soon as the serpent’s head shows itself through the egg, scotch it. If you don’t, your mind will become the abode of monsters.”
Of course to those who believe in immortality, a faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe is almost unescapable. Beliefs cannot be made to order, but looked at in the most Philistine way, this one fills so many otherwise apparent gaps in the order of the universe, saves so many apparent wastes, changes so much chaos into kosmos, that, when relieved of some of its absurd accompaniments from the past, the belief seems, in the broadest view, almost a matter of course; and the narrowing of one’s view of existence by physical death appears absurd. The belief in immortality is such a simple and inexpensive machine for settling bad problems that, as in the case of any simple and inexpensive machine that throws out good results, there is a presumption in favor of investing in it. This, I suppose, is what they call Pragmatism. It has its dangers: for its principle is apt to be misconstrued, and Hope tells such flattering tales! But apparently Pragmatism has no direct business with hopes, but only with cold hypotheses; and if one must choose between hypotheses, the preferable one is that which strings the facts into the most orderly coherence; and certainly without immortality, the universe is much nearer chaos than with it.
Most of our upsets come from lack of health, or money or friends. Now if the universe holds for us ultimately an existence where we shan’t have to bother with such vile bodies, or such demands as they make for money, and where we may recover all the friends we have lost here, and if our troubles here aid in our development, as they certainly do, the universe appears much more orderly,and our worst problems are fairly settled. Perhaps a strong proud effective soul might not care much for a future existence that, in such brief outline, seems so easy; but I don’t know that our wide and exact knowledge of that existence contains anything to indicate that in it one will not have at least as good a chance as here to make his own way, or the way of those he cares for; and while doing this, to make his own additions to the gayety of nations, or their celestial equivalent. I don’t see, either, any indication warranting any shameless, weak and impotent soul—one like yours and mine when we have the blues—in refraining from doing its little best here, on the ground that everything will be made straight there, and that therefore it is just as well to wait. For there appear more and more weaknesses in the demonstration that even shining garments and harps and halos are to be passed around free, or indeed that anybody will start there with anything more than he takes with him. There does not seem, however, aught to negative the guess already hazarded regarding health and fortune and friends—that what capacity for winning them one does take, may have a better chance for activity there than it has here. And as capacity improves by practice, all this plain paragraph is an argument for doing one’s best here, and not sitting around indulging in the blues.
I freely admit, however—most freely—that such views, especially regarding the gayety, have not the sanction of very old or very wide acceptance; but with the decay of Puritanism, they seem on the way to more.
Before we leave old-fashioned remedies, under however new-fashioned aspects, it may be well to consider another one that greatly helped our ancestors—the belief in an over-ruling Providence that really does help those who help themselves. In the form the belief was known to them, it is not known to many of us; but we may have it in a better form. For the narrow conception of an anthropomorphicgod constantly tinkering at the universe, we can substitute the idea of an intelligence so great that it does not need to watch each act, and specifically adjust each result; but has established a law so comprehensive as to give each of our motives its legitimate consequences—a law that in some ways rewards each of our good intentions, even when it seems to fail, and punishes each of our evil ones, even when it seems to succeed. Faith in such a law makes us feel secure in spite of the haunting anxiety lest we break through the volcano’s crust. The sparrow’s flight may be free if compensation awaits its fall. And we may know a higher freedom and a fuller meaning, even a creative joy, in the feeling that when we shape our acts toward the best ends we know, we can leave the rest to a benign law that goes deeper into motive than human gropings can, gives rewards better than we can devise, and punishments that do not merely afflict but tend to cure.
But all these faiths are another story. Faiths are good when they are not counter to reason, and the most matter-of-fact of us act on them every hour. But the big ones won’t come at mere bidding. What I have been principally trying to get you to do, in case you are subject to the blues, is to take hold and keep hold of the actual prosaic fact that in our year and place of grace, life has reached a fairly substantial foundation, and that throwing oneself open to every possible attack of the blues, through a chronic feeling that life is on a very ticklish basis, not only permits a great many needless attacks, but goes counter to the facts—is mathematically absurd. When you are scared, it is not because the universe is going to turn turtle, but because you are confusing its center of gravity with your own, and developing too much of a wrong sort of gravity above your own. Hopefulness is really the only reasonable attitude; at worst you lose nothing by it, unless it makes you careless.
Life is fairly reliable, and death at worst is simply nothing, while there are growing reasons to believe that it is better than life. And yet it is the one unfailing subject of abnormal brooding. It is possible at any moment, inevitable at some moment; and for that very reason it is, from most aspects, as a subject of worry, absurd at any moment. One of the sanest and sweetest men I ever knew, who lived to be nearly ninety, told me that he never thought of it.
Of all the humbugs of priestcraft, it is the greatest. The priests, who once owned a third of England, and probably more than a third of Italy, made more money out of death and its accessories than out of all the rest of the paraphernalia in their kit. Hell and purgatory and poor dear Dante’s scenery and properties were all part of the machinery. How shocked Dante would have been if he had realized how he was furnishing such ammunition! (A friend, on reading this, was surprised at my calling Dante “dear,” because he is generally regarded as so austere a man. To me he is not only dear, but like nearly all great geniuses, “as a little child.”) And some four centuries later, how shocked would have been another poet—not so poor or quite so dear, if he could have realized what a part he was playing in the same loathsome game! With them, one thinks of the geniuses who wrote theDies Iraeand those other wonderful hymns, and questions what they too might have felt if they had realized all they were doing. Then come to mind some other contributors to the humbug, who as a rule were not poor, and were not dear at all, and who stole the sheet-iron thunder and resin lightning—John Calvin and Cotton Mather, and so on down to some poor dear men even so late as when the older of us were in college, who made us get up before daylight in winter, and go and hear them pray, because they feared that if they didn’t, and we didn’t, we should all go to Dante’s or Milton’s or some other man’s Hell.
Well, perhaps we who have a new century to play with, especially the younger of us, fancy among its fresh attractions a thorough emancipation from these old superstitions. But they are in the very blood our fathers transmitted to us. Many have had all the anti-toxic serum needed for immunity from serious attacks, but we are all liable to twinges—hours, perhaps days, of discomfort from that identical disease, when we don’t know what’s the matter with us.
Fear of pain is part of the equipment of self-defense evolved in the higher animals, but whether those below man fear death, is, I suppose, open to question. I believe horses and sheep, at least, show fear or aversion from the dead of their own kind. I have known it instantly shown by a child supposed too young to know anything of the subject. But be all that as it may, you can get far above the mere animal instinct, up into the tender human affections like those of my dear old friend, and find it probably true that normal creatures do not think about death, unless some external circumstance leads them to. Yet my old friend, with intelligence enough for the ordinary demands of life and the most delicate of its courtesies, would not have been called a thoughtful or imaginative man. But another dear old friend who was both (I don’t know why I shouldn’t say that I’m thinking of Stedman), I don’t believe ever thought much about death, except in the abstract, unless some distinct external circumstance led him to. And he was a very unusually normal man. On the whole, I don’t believe normal people do think about it, in the concrete, unless they have to. Well then, most of the thought about it in the concrete is abnormal, and in more senses than even the priests made it, death is a humbug.
Don’t let us get the blues about it then. If we want an excuse for them, let’s find it reasonably, in being obliged to survive when we prefer to follow. But there are few such cases, and Time takes care of them; and, as reasoningbeings, let us realize that it is sweet and normal that he should, and let us no more resist Time in our perverse ways, than we would in the ways of the Egyptians.
And our ways are very perverse when they make us cling to some of the most absurd fashions from older civilizations, and neglect the wise ones. How long will it take us to put the Greek symbol of the lovely youth with the inverted torch, in place of the skull and cross-bones on the Puritan tombs? But we are coming on well when we bring forward the symbols of love to cover grief, and put flowers with the crape outside the door, and over the coffin. But we are not doing equally well when, after we let a woman have a veil, or a man slink down a side street, because they don’t want to recognize people, we, after they have got beyond that, still compel them to keep away from people, and even from music and the theatre, when they most need them. We can generally count on mourners suffering enough without any aid from such fashions.
But leaving out our relations to other people, in the deepest part of our very selves—the part that gets the blues, why have them over the certainty of death? When we were boys, wasn’t it a good way to avoid them before going back to school, to make the most of the last days? Today may be the last day.
If the best way out of worry is work, don’t sit around moping about that journey, but work. Pack up. You can’t take too much baggage—of the right kind. There are some reasons to suspect that in the new country you’ll find more use than you had here for all that you can get together of learning and wisdom and aspirations and affections: love is giving rather than receiving, you know—even to the point of giving unrecognized. Why not there as well as here? True, your constitution may not be up to that one-sided kind forever, but you may not have to wait so long as that.
And even if you’re lost, baggage and all, it will not havebeen wasted: for it will have done its service here, and it will not need to be renewed. And you can’t be sure now that you won’t want it. And how ineffably silly it is to worry over the possibility of oblivion! That surely can’t hurt. But if anybody believes that consciousness continues, shut up in a Pozzi-like darkness, deprived of an opportunity to enjoy this beautiful universe or any other,that’ssomething to worry over. But did anybody ever invent such a Hell as that, or if anybody did, has anybody now any justification for having the blues over it? If you are worried by Scripture, probably you know that of the three uses of “outer darkness” in Matthew, two plainly refer to earthly conditions, and the third may fairly be taken in the same sense.
If you get tired packing, and need more work in view of departure, don’t go back to moping, but get right up and put things in shape for those you’re going to leave behind. But don’t bother them, or do foolish things. One of the best things about that journey is that nearly all the wise preparations for staying here are equally wise for going. So you would be foolish to make very manyspecificpreparations for going. In fact specific preparations for that journey have involved more of the waste and tomfoolery of the world than almost anything else—perhaps more than even war or fashion.
But be ready to go when you’re called.
Meantime circumstances may be so against you that you can’t have a happy life; but probably you can, if you so will, have at least a cheerful one, and those who have had the experience say that it’s pretty hard to tell the difference—that they amount to about the same thing, except that, on the whole, the cheerful life is the more effective; and that, at best, happiness is but a by-product.
All this simple advice may be easier to follow than you think, and if you do follow it, probably you won’t have the blues.