Remainderman

“ How sweet the retirement in which I here live. The precious word is now my only study, in the work of translation. Though, in a manner, buried to the world,—neither seeing nor seen by Europeans,—the time flows on here with great rapidity: it seems as if life would be gone before any thing is done, or even before any thing is begun. I sometimes rejoice that I am not twenty-seven years of age; and that, unless God should order it otherwise, I may double the number in constant and successful labour. ”

“ At all events, it reminds us, if there he any materials for reflection within us, of the brevity of our span of life, and of the littleness of its aims; a visible Eternity seeming to lie before us, in the presence of which we are humbled. ”

“ Yet the desire in him to reach them seemed to the wise old heart something that must be set aside. He must return. Yes! he must return. To do what? What could an old man do who had left life, a useless life, behind him? He crushed down that thought also, and stumbled on.
"Man is like a thing of nought, his time passeth away like a shadow!"
His voice spent itself tremulously on that one certainty, and those behind him joined their testimony to his all unwittingly, as they called on Hârâ or Hârî; on the Creator, the Destroyer, as One and Indivisible. ”

“ All these things seemed to have happened so long ago, and yet we were living still. Living, did I say? Ay, if such an existence as ours could be called a life, fourteen of us were living still. Who would be the next to go? ”

“ The world had grown old, and all its inmates partook of the decrepitude. Why talk of infancy, manhood, and old age? We all stood equal sharers of the last throes of time-worn nature. Arrived at the same point of the world's age—there was no difference in us; the name of parent and child had lost their meaning; young boys and girls were level now with men. ”

“ After my way of living, I neither enjoy a full Society, nor a perfect Retirement. ’Tis only an innocent confining of my self to those delights, which best agree with my inclinations. Disgusted with gross Vice, and offended by the practice of too rigid Virtue, I possess all those harmless pleasures that are most suitable to the repose of old Age, and affect me in proportion to what I am capable of relishing with satisfaction. ”

“ He never swerved from his belief in the soul's responsibility to its past, or of its commitment to a retrogressive movement after death. 'We drop, fainting, out of the ranks in a desolate place,' he said. 'We come to, alone and abandoned. ”

“ Retirement properly so called, for busy scenes and active employments; from a space in which there was not room for ambition, to one where ambition appeared to have no limit; from a spot where a few wild flowers occasionally charmed the sight with their beauty, and the senses with their fragrance, to the prolific and auspicious nursery of every science and every art; from knowing every body, to knowing nobody ”

“ 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! ”

“ In other quarters there is ease, And I dwell here, alone and sorrowful. Everybody is going into retirement, And I alone dare not seek rest. The ordinances of Heaven are inexplicable, But I will not dare to follow my friends, and leave my post. ”

“ To me it appears that such a sentiment has been expressed without due reflection on all the facts of the case, and that the retirement of such a man, under all the circumstances, presents to the contemplative observer one of the grandest moral spectacles of the age. ”

“ Do those who die in infancy or childhood continue to grow in the other world, as they would have done had they remained longer in this? Or do they continue forever the same in stature as when they departed this life? ”

“ I have not only retired from all public employments, but am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none I am determined to be pleased with all, and this, my dear friend, being the order of my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers. ”

“ Remember, my beloved, and compare and consider in thy mind, who is there of former generations who has been left in this world so as to continue for ever? Death has led away the former generations, the great ones and the mighty and the subtle. ”

“ Comfort and discomfort of our four limbs are still with us, as of old. The miseries and pleasures of this life are still with us, as of old. The changes of good government and rebellion are still with us, as of old. And since these things are actually heard and seen and do alternate, even a hundred years seem too many; how much more miserable would be a still further prolongation of life? ”

“ Understand that this casual, personal life which now comes into being and to-morrow is no more can have no permanence, that no external means, no construction of it can give it consecutiveness and permanence. ”

“ For us mankind was a distant future, to which we were all on the way. ”

“ The ten years from forty to fifty—the best ten years of his life! And if one counted the years before, the silent years of dreams, assimilation, preparation—then call it half a man's life-time: half a man's life-time thrown away! ”

“ It was a heavy blow for the old man, who was counting the days until his son should come to America and go into partnership with him. The world became a dark and sad place for him and he had no ambition to go on living. ”

“ And besides these, how many other things there are that militate against, I do not say the eternity, but even the survival of one's name. First there is the death of those with whom one has passed one's life; and that forgetfulness which is the common bane of old age: then there is the rising fame, ever growing greater, of new men ”

“ Apart from all noise without, from all tumult of things human let him remain quiet within, that would think of those eternal years. Are the years wherein we are eternal, or those wherein our ancestors have been, or those wherein our posterity are to be? Far be it that they should be esteemed eternal. ”

“ Of what consequence was it to our four hearts, that they alone were the fountains of life in the wide world? As far as mere individual sentiment was concerned, we had rather be left thus united together, than if, each alone in a populous desert of unknown men, we had wandered truly companionless till life's last term. ”

“ I can only say that it has been expiated—such as it was, by twenty miserable years, and that the last expiation is even yet not come. Your father once said, and his words dashed from me the first hope which ever entered my mind concerning you, that he never would clasp the hand of a man who had taken the life of another. What would he say to a man who had taken a life, and concealed the fact for twenty years? I am that man. ”

“ And can eternity belong to me,
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour? ”

“ Did I ever pretend to be anything but resigned—or to be in love with him after the first few weeks? I guess I’m spoiled with too much devotion, that’s what. Seeing too many men lose their heads. Much their old heads are worth. ”

“ This old man, tottering on the edge of the grave, and prolonging his prospect through millions of calculated years,—this visionary who had not seen starvation in the wasted forms of his wife and children, or plague in the horrible sights and sounds that surrounded him—this astronomer, apparently dead on earth, and living only in the motion of the spheres—loved his family with unapparent but intense affection. Through long habit they had become a part of himself; his want of worldly knowledge, his absence of mind and infant guilelessness, made him utterly dependent on them. ”

“ As we advance in life we turn our backs to all this but when the retreat begins we face the stupendous whole of it again and death is freedom from the progressive limitations involved in individuation and a return home to the One and All. ”

“ And a few there are who tell us that they live there always, listening to the voice of God; but these are old and worn with journeying—men and women who have outlived passions and ambitions and the fire heats of love, and who now, girt about with memories, stand face to face with the sphinx Eternity. ”

“ Sometimes, when that most misleading faculty called common sense urged that you, too, must be dead, I have pictured your meeting in the great beyond. Indeed, it is the hope of such reunions that accounts for mortal belief in immortality. ”

“ He knew then that whatever waited for him in the long years to be lived before he became an old man—whether there were other women to meet and other lands to travel—these moments he was living now would walk with him in memory to the very shadow of the grave. ”

“ Perfectly fitted as he was to cope with the world, and to fight his way to any desired position, he chose to retire from it, and in solitude to work out what appeared to him to be the true destiny of his life. ”

“ When we reflect on the departure of one, whose face and figure still dwell in the minds of many of us, it would be wise to remember, that we ourselves are making for the same point of our journey, the concluding scene of this short existence, the end of our probation. ”

“ May I venture to hope, sir, that just at the moment of quitting our common retreat to return to the world, you will deign to receive favorably the request, however intrusive, of a poor old man, whose life will henceforth be passed in solitude, and who cannot therefore have any prospect of meeting you, in that vortex of society which he has abandoned forever. ”

“ Where any such survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in their hearts, he argues that they had much better remain as they are, for in such a belated union as they aspire to the chances are overwhelmingly against them. ”

“ Here we stand, having grown from youth to manhood, from manhood to old age, marching from our very cradles into our graves. The changes that come naturally upon us we bear, if we are wise, with patience and resignation ”

“ Someone comes in and tells you, "I bring you thirty years of existence; it is the immutable decree of fate; fifteen consecutive years must be happy, and fifteen years unhappy. You are at liberty to choose the half by which you wish to begin." ”

“ It would be the thing natural, should you who open these leaves put the question of motive and ask why, when now I am retired, and should be cautious with my threescore years, I come forth with confidences which, aside from the mere sorrow of them, are like to prove less for my honor than I might wish. Why is it that I who have removed my loneliness and my millions to scenes of peace at least, may not leave well enough alone? ”

“ I am free from ties and can live a life of retirement.
When I rise from sleep, I play with books and harp. ”

“ Looking ahead now he saw himself as an old man wandering from refuge to refuge, pursued always by the resurrected corpse of his old life, which though it contained neither his spirit nor his will, still triumphed by the awful semblance it bore his outward body. ”

“ The old man felt the system of universal nature which he had so long studied and adored, slide from under him, and he stood among the dead, and lifted his voice in curses.—No wonder that the attendant should interpret as phrensy the harrowing maledictions of the grief-struck old man. ”

“ What pleasure canst thou enjoy, who livest forlorn and solitary in a trackless and unpeopled desert? who hast no mate to caress thee, no young ones to excite thy tenderness and reward thy cares, no kindred, no society among thy fellows? Not long life only, but immortality itself would be a curse, if it were to be bestowed on such uncomfortable terms. ”

“ We individuals just pick up a mixed lot of things out of the powers that begat us, and lay them down again presently a little altered, that's all—heredities, traditions, the finger nails of my grandfather, a great-aunt's lips, the faith of a sect, the ideas of one's time. We live and then we die, and the threads run, dispersing this way and that. To make other people again. Whatever's immortal isn't that, our looks or our habits, our thoughts or our memories—just the shapes, these are, of one immortal stuff.... One immortal stuff."... ”

“ Retirement, however solitary it may be, when entered into with such a temper of mind, instead of creating or encouraging any hatred toward the species, raises our ideas of the possible dignity of human nature; disposes our hearts to feel, and our hands to relieve, the misfortunes and necessities of our fellow creatures; calls to our minds what high capacious powers lie folded up in man ”

“ You can scarcely imagine to yourself the retired life we live, and how we have retreated from the kind advances of the English society here. Now people seem to understand that we are to be left alone. ”

“ I live for ever. My outward life will cease, and my dust will return to dust—but I shall last undying.' And ask yourselves—What then? 'Am I making "provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof," in more or less refined fashion, and forgetting to provide for that which lives for evermore? Eternity is in my heart. ”