An undefinable taint of death had always clung
about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal
disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the
interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his
previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement,
which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well!
we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of
death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont tous
condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then
our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness,
some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this
world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that
interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.
Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and
sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested
or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.
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