Page 191 - erewhon

purchasing with the miseries of a decrepit age? If you are
good, strong, and handsome, you have a fine fortune indeed
at twenty, but how much of it will be left at sixty? For you
must live on your capital; there is no investing your pow-
ers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever: you
must eat up your principal bit by bit, and be tortured by
seeing it grow continually smaller and smaller, even though
you happen to escape being rudely robbed of it by crime or
casualty.
‘Remember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty
who would not come back into the world of the unborn if he
could do so with decency and honour. Being in the world he
will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go; but do you
think that he would consent to be born again, and re-live
his life, if he had the offer of doing so? Do not think it. If he
could so alter the past as that he should never have come
into being at all, do you not think that he would do it very
gladly?
‘What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was
not this, when he cried out upon the day in which he was
born, and the night in which it was said there is a man
child conceived? ‘For now,’ he says, ‘I should have lain still
and been quiet, I should have slept; then had I been at rest
with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built des-
olate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold,
who filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden untime-
ly birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are
at rest.’ Be very sure that the guilt of being born carries this

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