But I cannot be persuaded that he
who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief
space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth
there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange
aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration
and nothing but an aberration.
More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk
about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our
will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this
sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by
saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about
it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human
action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal
disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about
it.
_Meglio oprando obliar, senza indagarlo,
Questo enorme mister del universo!_
"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of
the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same
Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the
earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by
the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a
single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods,
surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O
sun, set across the immense frozen waste.
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