Читать книгу The Heart's Domain - Georges Duhamel - Страница 16

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The will to happiness attains its perfection in the mature man. With adolescence it passes through a redoubtable crisis.

Nietzsche says: “There is less melancholy in the mature man than in the young man.” It is true.

Very young people cultivate sadness as something noble. They do not readily forgive themselves for not being always sad. They have discovered the mysterious isle of melancholy and do not wish to escape from it again. They love everything about that black magician and his attitudes and his tears and his nostalgia and his romantic beauty. They have a fierce disdain for vulgar pleasures and take refuge in sadness because they do not yet know the splendor and majesty of joy.

But in their own fashion, which is full of disdain, reserve and ingenuous complexity, they do not any the less seek for happiness.

With age happiness appears as truly the sole, serene study of man. As he rests upon the moral possession of the world, he believes that with time and experience he can remain insensible to the wearing out of his bodily organs.

He who knows how to be happy and to win forgiveness for his happiness, how enviable he is!—the only true model among those that are wise.

It is now, just now, that these things ought to be said, in the hour when our old continent bleeds in every member, in the hour when our future seems blotted out by the menace of every sort of servitude and of a hopeless labor that will know neither measure nor redemption.