No More Learning

Nor could I understand how Dante,
who says that 'sorrow remarries us to God,' could have been so harsh to
those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any such there really were. I
had no idea that some day this would become to me one of the greatest
temptations of my life.

While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one desire.
When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred here, and found
myself growing gradually better in physical health, I was filled with
rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very day on which I left
prison. After a time that evil mood passed away, and I made up my mind
to live, but to wear gloom as a king wears purple: never to smile again:
to turn whatever house I entered into a house of mourning: to make my
friends walk slowly in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is
the true secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them
with my own pain. Now I feel quite differently. I see it would be both
ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when my friends
came to see me they would have to make their faces still longer in order
to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to entertain them, to invite
them to sit down silently to bitter herbs and funeral baked meats. I
must learn how to be cheerful and happy.

The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends here, I
tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my cheerfulness, in
order to make them some slight return for their trouble in coming all the
way from town to see me. It is only a slight return, I know, but it is
the one, I feel certain, that pleases them most. I saw R--- for an hour
on Saturday week, and I tried to give the fullest possible expression of
the delight I really felt at our meeting. And that, in the views and
ideas I am here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by
the fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a real
desire for life.

There is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a terrible
tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little
of it.
I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a
fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that I can explore what is
no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world
is? I think you can guess what it is. It is the world in which I have
been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of
every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible:
to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not
part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My
mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe's
lines--written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and
translated by him, I fancy, also:--

'Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,--
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers. '

They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon
treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and
exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her
later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth
hidden in them. I could not understand it.