Life...! ! !

"Oh, life," he cried in his heart, "Oh life, where is thy sting?"

For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with itanother idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him thePersian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but thepleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if onewas forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so mighta man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little needto do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his ownpleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings,his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, orbeautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had thepower of selection, though it might be no more than a fantasticlegerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that didnot matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp of life (ariver arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with thebackground to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing wasimportant, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting thevarious strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, themost obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew tomanhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; butthere were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did notenter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might bediscovered a more troubling grace. Some lives, and Hayward's was amongthem, the blind indifference of chance cut off while the design was stillimperfect; and then the solace was comfortable that it did not matter;other lives, such as Cronshaw's, offered a pattern which was difficult tofollow, the point of view had to be shifted and old standards had to bealtered before one could understand that such a life was its ownjustification. Philip thought that in throwing over the desire forhappiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life hadseemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemedto gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by somethingelse. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, asall the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of thedesign. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of hisexistence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they haddone before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to addto the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he wouldrejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be nonethe less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with hisdeath it would at once cease to be.

Philip was happy.

'Of Human Bondage'