Lifebuoy

“ The only sign of life, if life it can be called, is in her eyes and her faint respiration. But this hideous wreck of a body contains an immortal soul, purified by suffering, utterly resigned, lifted above itself, this simple peasant nature, into the realms of perfect self-renunciation. ”

“ Can the death of this lump of clay change the I that is really myself? Can anything exterminate the living me? Every throb of my whole being tells me that I am more than this perishable flesh—that I am more than time or place or condition or death! ”

“ Gradually the Man Life approached, seized and enveloped me, closing around me as a jelly fish surrounds its living victim, while the horrors of a nightmare came over my soul.
"Man's life is a fearful dream," I shouted, as I writhed in agony; "I am still a child, and will remain one; keep off! Life of man, away! let me live and die a child." ”

“ Your son, son-in-laws, brothers,—if any one of these were equal to your mind, you could have left charge with him, and in illness could have lived a retired, secluded life free from anxieties. Whenever I recall to my mind your thinned limbs, pale face, and enfeebled voice,—and over and above that, your anxieties and troubles for others—when I recall to my mind how you go to Karmatar with only a servant for your companion, it strikes me, why should I be still living? ”

“ Living in a reverie, still,—a fancy, a day-dream, strangely vivid and life-like, but not real,—not real, I was so far softened by my illness that, with the delicious sense of returning health and strength, I was content, for a time, to live simply in the present, to dismiss the stern warden, Duty, from my thoughts, and that ever-grave necessity for maintaining a mental and moral superiority which had so oppressed me. ”

“ Now everything is dead in me, no longer is there even a corpse sacred enough for me to respect its sleep. No longer will there be any vacillation, for you yourself, an idealistic youth, a gentle dove, understand the necessity and come to spur me to action. ”

“ We wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity: we have laboured hard: we have sweated blood: we have led a life full of misery, of gall, and of poison. And why? To bring ourselves to a still more wretched life in this pit of fire. ”

“ And Life replied:
“Sorrow, unceasing struggle, disappointment;
after these
Darkness and silence.” The Soul said unto Death:
“What dos thou offer me?” And Death replied:
“In the beginning what Life gives at last.”
Turning to Life: “And if I live and struggle?”
“Others shall live and struggle after thee
Counting it easier where thou hast passed.” ”

“ This pleasing delusion, and this credulity, quite cancel that chief good of human nature, death, and, as it were, double the misery of him who is about to die, by anxiety as to what is to happen to him after it. And, indeed, if life really is a good, to whom can it be so to have once lived? ”

“ At about this age he appears to have grown weary of this desultory kind of life, and one day, meeting in his walks with an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a priest, he was led to turn his thoughts upon the evils and the evanescence of life. ”

“ When it has blinkers on, they seem to be shutting up its eyes for death, like the windows of a house. Fatigue and the habit of suffering have become as natural to the creature as the bit to its mouth. ”

“ Go through our great cities and observe the emaciated, sickly, and distorted specimens of humanity to be found therein; recall your own existence and that of all the people with whose lives you are familiar; recall the instances of violent deaths and suicides of which you have heard,—and then ask yourself for what cause all this suffering and death, this despair that leads to suicide, has been endured. ”

“ Care would soon overwhelm us; the heart would corrode; the river of life would be like the lake of the Dismal Swamp; we should begin our career with a sigh, and end it with a groan; while cadaverous faces, and words to the tune of 'The Dead March in Saul,' would make up the whole interlude of our existence. ”

“ If the issues of life and death were in mortal hands, how differently we should arrange things! I know at this moment half a dozen weary old creatures whose lives are no pleasure to themselves or to anyone else, but they live on, while the young and the happy fall by the way. ”

“ His life had been spent in the wastes, with rough deeds and rugged habits, and a youth of hardship, danger, and almost savage endurance, had given him a half-barbarian temperament, which could strike an angry blow at one moment and fondle to death at the next. ”

“ THE longer I live, and the more I see the misery of life—the more my desire of living is extinguished. What I formerly esteemed trifles, and would not deign to term misfortunes, now appear with a formidable aspect—though I once thought them harmless, and innoxious to my peace, they assume new terrours every day.—But is not this observation general? It is—It is thus every son of human nature, gradually wishes for death, and neglects to seek for, and improve those comforts, which by diligent search there is a possibility of attaining. ”

“ But youth and health did not last long, soon came sicknesses and sorrows, which tormented him by day and took away his rest by night. 'Die I shall not,' said he to himself, 'for Death will send his messengers before that, but I do wish these wretched days of sickness were over.' As soon as he felt himself well again he began once more to live merrily. ”

“ Do ye not know that every moment ye live brings ye nearer to your end? Your clothes wear out, your woods and your houses decay, and yet ye look that your bodies should be immortal. What are the common accidents and diseases of life, but so many warnings to provide yourself for a remove? ”

“ If the line of health is not in the centre of the hand, and if there is only the line of life, and the line of fortune united so as to form an angle, a natural death cannot be looked for. Do not, therefore, look for a natural death! ”

“ Beginning with the earliest stages of life, and ending with the latest, I have pointed out some of the causes of the needless mortality and the prevalent imperfection of health, for which society is answerable. Slight and superficial as my treatment of the subject must be in a series of essays like these, I believe I have exhibited facts enough to show that we have all something to do in checking untimely death, both in our own persons and in those of our neighbours. ”

“ Now we are alive, fighting and struggling, hoping, despairing, suffering and rejoicing, weeping and laughing; that is life. We have climbed to the heights of joy, and we have descended into the depths of misery. ”

“ And our will-to-live contains a germ of suicide, and our survival-of-the-fittest the germ of degeneracy. As for the earth going round the sun: it goes round as the blood goes round my body, absolutely mysteriously, with the rapidity and hesitation of life. ”

“ That grim presence shadows our lives, but who can deny that in that shadow the sense of duty, the feeling of sobriety and responsibility, the appreciation of the gravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire to develop and improve, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavened our whole society from end to end? ”

“ Wouldst thou desire to live for ever? Wouldst thou only wish thy life to last for a thousand years? Remember the long hours of weariness in thy short career, thy frequent fainting under the burden. Thou wast aghast at the limited horizon of a short, uncertain and fugitive life: what wouldst thou have said if thou hadst seen an immeasurable, inevitably long future of weariness and sorrow stretch before thy eyes! ”

“ Here was the sole surviving specimen of what in the Past was the best that the men and women could expect—namely, to be spared until the age of seventy-five, and then to linger on afflicted with miserable diseases and, slowly or swiftly, to be tortured to death. ”

“ Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is the comforter—of the mournful passage of the death-cart—of the insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart—of harrowing shrieks and silence dire—of the variety of disease, desertion, famine, despair, and death? ”

“ If you faced the thing honestly, what was life, anyway, after the climacteric of youth? Nothing but a long drawn out decay of the body, a gradual dulling of the senses, an imperceptible slackening of the will—a slower and more humiliating death. ”

“ Here fifty human beings—fifty, the only human beings that survived of the food-teeming earth, assembled to read in the looks of each other ghastly plague, or wasting sorrow, desperation, or worse, carelessness of future or present evil. ”

“ I came into the world with so few signs of life, that they entertained but little hope of preserving me, with the seeds of a disorder that has gathered strength with years, and from which I am now relieved at intervals, only to suffer a different, though more intolerable evil. ”

“ Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. ”

“ Which is 146the greater and finer, the blameless life of the patient brute, or the winding, devious path of a human soul? It is only the dull level that brings no sorrow or regret. It is a sterile soil where no weeds will grow, and a bare closet where no skeleton will dwell. ”

“ They live by hunting and fishing, and they are long- lived. If they fall sick, they cure themselves without medicine, by the heat of the fire, and their death at last comes from extreme old age. We judge them to be very affectionate and charitable towards their relatives—making loud lamentations in their adversity, and in their misery calling to mind all their good fortune. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ Often as I pass by the dwelling of some suffering mortal I am tempted to stop and banish the poor thing's misery. Yet suffering, in moderation, is the natural lot of mortals, and it is not our place to interfere with the laws of Nature. ”

“ Can we ever bury that body out of our sight, and heap the mould upon it, and tramp it into the clay? The men and the women may change—they may grow old—they may die—they may pass from the familiar haunts, and the place which has known them may know them no more ”

“ Not alone are there degrees of cold and hunger of the body,—discomfortable and ill-nourished living,—but there are, as well, things which seem to me even more difficult to endure—unsatisfied hunger of the mind and heart and a most cruel and persistent chill of the spirit. ”

“ My little boy, on whom my husband set high hopes, was born after nine of the most unhappy, distressing months of my life, a sickly, nervous, fretting child—myself in miniature, and after five years of life that was predestined by all the circumstances to be just what it was, after giving us only anxiety and care, he died, leaving us sadder and wiser. ”

“ To this pointless knowledge there came a dawning struggle with the powers of mortality, until very slowly, inch by inch, the negativeness was driven back, and the spark of life began to brighten within me. ”

“ You, perhaps, may say, that you endure the cares and anxieties inseparable from your state of life: that solicitude for the present and future well-being of yourselves and families embitters your days: that you labour from morning till night, and that, in spite of all your endeavours, you are frequently the victims of want, of wretchedness, of infirmities, and of other numberless evils. ”

“ If you live, it is as certain as fate that you will come to the second and the third. Your 'eyes will grow dim,' your 'natural force' will be 'abated,' your body will become a burden, your years that are full of buoyancy will be changed for years of heaviness and weariness, strength will decay, 'and the young men'—that is you—'shall utterly fall.'
And the text points also to another fact, that, long before your natural life shall have begun to tend towards decay, hard work and occasional sorrows and responsibilities and burdens of all sorts will very often make you wearied and ready to faint. ”

“ We had began to count his life by months then, and as each period of mental toil came round, the wing of approaching death fell more darkly over my page and over my heart. Reader, do you know how we may live and suffer while the business of life goes regularly on, giving no token of the tears that are silently shed? ”

“ And let such People reflect seriously upon the Number of Children born into the World in this luxurious, intemperate vitious Age, and in this City in particular, who die in the very Infancy of their Life, who coming into the World loaded with Distempers, the effect of their Parents Intemperance and unnatural Excesses, struggle a few Days with the unequal Burthen of Life, and expire under the Weight of it. ”