Which is greater, the love of life or the fear of death? If you level them out you have the sphere of earth: a roundness purporting to be flat. Earth is the sphere of our activity - we walk in it in life and lie in it in death. Therefore in a sense the joys and fears are equal. We forget ourselves by night and remember by day. We expend our life by day, recoup by night. As an individual I am an eternal thing: a myth born in a moment. I am like an ornament hanging on a tree which is already dying. The world is the vehicle for my existence but that existence must always pass away. As regards life things might as well be equal - the love of life and the fear of death. As regards my individuality, my heart is like a square object in a round space. It must go on trying because the earth is walking in me too.
Life is a dream; the waking point is pain. I hardly have the right to speak of pain - to quote chapter and verse - unless I am prepared to bear the burden of my own and help others carry theirs. Therefore I have to make myself a beast of burden. But as a human spirit I also want to soar up to the sun. How can I reconcile these things? Become a donkey with wings? An ox who ascends? I am what I am: I'm born to do and to try and to be what I can. Nothing will stop me even though I plod the silent road. Here it is that pain reveals itself as the light-bearer. It is the gilt on my hoofs, the silver on my tongue - it lifts me, one foot at a time, where I might otherwise not go. It ascends with me, raises me to the sun by diverse ways - the weight in the legs becomes lightness to rise up. And what is more it gives me the precious coin of expression: sympathy for all life. How else could Don Quixote - a dreamer - outride the jeers and remain a Don to the very tips of his toes? Because he knew the impossible can happen - he understood the roundness of life.
All this belongs to the question of fatalism or commitment. Fatalism is where things happen to you; you have no control over them and no choice but to accept them. It's the condition you live in before taking the decision to level out the love of life and the fear of death. After taking that decision the flat roundness of earth is yours to live on. Pain is no longer an expression of fate but a commitment. Ultimately the gilt and the silver appear through it. No one wants or invites pain - but you have to dream like Don or fly like the donkey to ascend to true life.
Jay
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