What Is Man, When You Come To

When We Are Young The Idea Of Death Or Failure Is Intolerable To Us; Even The Possibility Of Ridicule We Cannot Bear. But We Have Also An Unconquerable Faith In Our Own Stars, And In The Impossibility Of Anything Venturing To Go Against Us. As We Grow Old We Slowly Come To Believe That Everything Will Turn Out Badly For Us, And That Failure Is In The Nature Of Things, But Then We Do Not Much Mind What Happens To Us One Way Or The Other. In This Way A Balance Is Obtained.

Some Travelers Are Drawn Forward By A Goal Lying Before Them In The Way Iron Is Drawn To The Magnet. Others Are Driven On By A Force Lying Behind Them. In Such A Way The Bowstring Makes The Arrow Fly.

I Was Young, And By Instinct Of Self-preservation I Had To Collect My Energy On Something, If I Were Not To Be Whirled Away With The Dusk On The Farm-roads, Or The Smoke On The Plain. I Begun In The Evenings To Write Stories, Fairy-tales, And Romances, That Would Take My Mind A Long Way Off, To Other Countries And Times.

There Are Times Of Great Beauty On A Coffee Farm. When The Plantation Flowered In The Beginning Of The Rains, It Was A Radiant Sight, Like A Cloud Of Chalk, In The Mist Of The Drizzling Rain.

God Made The World, My Lord, And Looked At It, And Saw That It Was Good. Yes. But What If The World Had Looked Back At Him, To See Whether He Was Good Or Not?