That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can
anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is
to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time
pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because
the dance cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously
wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and
prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical
being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a
sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and
that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
What is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its
career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an
organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for
its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our
unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying
and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied
harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then
doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.

This same insight is contained in another wise myth which has inspired
morality and religion in India from time immemorial: I mean the doctrine
of Karma. We are born, it says, with a heritage, a character imposed, and
a long task assigned, all due to the ignorance which in our past lives has
led us into all sorts of commitments. These obligations we must pay off,
relieving the pure spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from
debts and assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves
by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would only involve us more
deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate our misery and
leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is understood to be a