You see here in a brief compendium what part in things Vigour may have, and what part Disgust: you must shun the latter and cleave to the former. The deliberation that peers anxiously into the future, and that which weighs every moment are all the same to you. The jury is out on what one's condition of life should be. Pursue one or another; there is not as much to choose between them as dull care may suppose. Whatever kind of life you choose, its novelty charms you, it keeps Disgust at bay. Hurry through the early stages, let the finishing-line be fixed before even the halfway stage; whereupon you will lose interest, and turn to another and still another diversion, with not dissimilar intent. No life is more lively than a varied life. Its appetite easily aroused, it now tastes something else, on which it feeds with more impatience than satisfaction. Why is there a law that we must finish what we have begun? Who decides this? Black Melancholy decides it, that she may have a supply of victims to slay with Disgust, Obstinacy, and Despair; that she may gradually strangle us and dry up our arteries, and banish from this great Scene whatever is fluid, unconstrained, and liberal. We cannot bear it; with our teeth and fingernails we tear at the unwelcome decree. But speak; we have only to hear you and we obey, O Tyrant Vigour, when you say,
Well begun is half done,and that he who gets quickly to the middle of the course is already past the finishing-line. A generous rule; but all the same its ingenuity limits you. Live, flourish, but only in the interval between the beginning and the middle. If you go a little further, if you penetrate deeper into the arcana of things, then soon, dismissed as a crank, you will fall to raving like an old bag-lady; you will hallucinate; you will see castles in plum-trees and forests in the clouds.
On the other hand...
An unstable and peripatetic life merely avoids tedium, rather than dispelling it. If you wander, and stray down by-ways, it becomes more wearisome to you than if you always press on by a direct route to the end of the road. The disgust engendered by Variety and Inconstancy themselves is surely the profoundest of all; and because it is born of its own remedies, it is incurable. When it rests on nothing stable, the mind loses itself in the very course of diverting itself; it is then so dispersed and entangled, so bewildered, that it can never compose itself again. It is like children once they have wandered too far away from home, distracted by their play. Suddenly coming to their senses, they are gripped by fear, and they look around, their little eyes widening, at the unfamiliar haunts; they gape, perspire, and with uncertain steps try to extricate themselves from a confusion that they cannot cope with. So the mind, wandering from its domestic scene, and its hinterland of accustomed and familiar things, having nowhere to take refuge, hesitates between strange things, no longer master of itself. On one side it is unnerved by the foreign appearance of everything, and on the other side it is engulfed by a mass of confusion. In other words, just as the mind is calmed by the harmony of things and by things rightly disposed, so things that are heaped up at random and jumbled up together disturb it. We are suddenly oppressed and concerned by every little thing that annoys us and does not chime with the order prescribed by our imagination. Accordingly, prescribe some settled way of life for yourself: not an attractive one, but one that is hard, and moved more by reason than opinion; and swear by it. The laws that generous Ardour will arrogate, Idleness can never abrogate; taking a break from them can never cause them to fall into disuse, Inconstancy can never change them, and Indulgence can never interpret them in a favourable sense. Be a rigid taskmaster to yourself. That you may do many things with pleasure, frequently do things that you do not do with pleasure. The solidest pleasure is that which you yourself will come to obtain from things in which pleasure is lacking. The pleasure is yours, bring it to things, not things to you. Claim it for yourself by most deserving it. In order that it may appear attractive from a distance, Nature has tinctured Virtue with joy. But how well tinctured! The very exercise of a virtuous mind is thoroughly anointed and saturated with joy. If diligence creates tedium, it also wears away tedium. I stand by the maxim: It is a bitter cup that must be drunk in spirit alone. Why should I spurn it like a child? Why should I hesitate? Why just sip, then merely thrust away, a medicine that I shall only have to drink eventually with renewed disgust?
