It Is So Much Easier To Live

There Is An Ecstasy That Marks The Summit Of Life, And Beyond Which Life Cannot Rise. And Such Is The Paradox Of Living, This Ecstasy Comes When One Is Most Alive, And It Comes As A Complete Forgetfulness That One Is Alive. This Ecstasy, This Forgetfulness Of Living, Comes To The Artist, Caught Up And Out Of Himself In A Sheet Of Flame; It Comes To The Soldier, War-mad In A Stricken Field And Refusing Quarter; And It Came To Buck, Leading The Pack, Sounding The Old Wolf-cry, Straining After The Food That Was Alive And That Fled Swiftly Before Him Through The Moonlight.

He Had No Conscious Knowledge Of Death, But Like Every Animal Of The Wild, He Possessed The Instinct Of Death. To Him It Stood As The Greatest Of Hurts. It Was The Very Essence Of The Unknown; It Was The Sum Of The Terrors Of The Unknown, The One Culminating And Unthinkable Catastrophe That Could Happen To Him, About Which He Knew Nothing And About Which He Feared Everything.

He Was Sounding The Deeps Of His Nature, And Of The Parts Of His Nature That Were Deeper Than He, Going Back Into The Womb Of Time.

Had The Cub Thought In Man-fashion, He Might Have Epitomized Life As A Voracious Appetite, And The World As A Place Wherein Ranged A Multitude Of Appetites, Pursuing And Being Pursued, Hunting And Being Hunted, Eating And Being Eaten, All In Blindness And Confusion, With Violence And Disorder, A Chaos Of Gluttony And Slaughter, Ruled Over By Chance, Merciless, Planless, Endless.

Love, Genuine Passionate Love, Was His For The First Time.