"The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about, was happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I can’t eat!" but, "I can’t work!"--that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man--that he cannot work,--that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly away, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished, vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: "not of the slightest consequence" whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical meat-jack with hard labour and rust. But our work,behold, that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains--for endless times and eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us for evermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-light, is gone, and divine everlasting Night, with her star diadems, with her silence and her veracities, is come!
Thomas Carlyle
(With thanks to Sebastian Marshall)
Photo Copyright 2014 R.Denham Carr
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