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Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson
page 29 of 166 (17%)
I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the
ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting
of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It
is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are
forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if
pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and
personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every
part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to
forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and tragic
fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus,
is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by-and-by his truant
interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather
flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise;
no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning
injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value
him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet
storing up.

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble
fallibility. When we have fallen through storey after storey of
our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it
is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they
stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how,
linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential
circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary
life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices
that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when
such a pin falls out - when there vanishes in the least breath of
time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our
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