Speech and the communication of thought, which, in their mutual relations, are always attended by a slight impulse on the part of the will, are almost a physical necessity.  Sometimes, however, the lower animals entertain me much more than the average man.  For, in the first place, what can such a man say?  It is only conceptions, that is, the driest of ideas, that can be communicated by means of words; and what sort of conceptions has the average man to communicate, if he does not merely tell a story or give a report, neither of which makes conversation?  The greatest charm of conversation is the mimetic part of it,—­the character that is manifested, be it never so little.  Take the best of men; how little he can say of what goes on within him, since it is only conceptions that are communicable; and yet a conversation with a clever man is one of the greatest of pleasures.

It is not only that ordinary men have little to say, but what intellect they have puts them in the way of concealing and distorting it; and it is the necessity of practising this concealment that gives them such a pitiable character; so that what they exhibit is not even the little that they have, but a mask and disguise.  The lower animals, which have no reason, can conceal nothing; they are altogether naive, and therefore very entertaining, if we have only an eye for the kind of communications which they make.  They speak not with words, but with shape and structure, and manner of life, and the things they set about; they express themselves, to an intelligent observer, in a very pleasing and entertaining fashion.  It is a varied life that is presented to him, and one that in its manifestation is very different from his own; and yet essentially it is the same.  He sees it in its simple form, when reflection is excluded; for with the lower animals life is lived wholly in and for the present moment:  it is the present that the animal grasps; it has no care, or at least no conscious care, for the morrow, and no fear of death; and so it is wholly taken up with life and living.

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The conversation among ordinary people, when it does not relate to any special matter of fact, but takes a more general character, mostly consists in hackneyed commonplaces, which they alternately repeat to each other with the utmost complacency.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Translator’s Note.—­This observation is in Schopenhauer’s own English.]

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Some men can despise any blessing as soon as they cease to possess it; others only when they have obtained it.  The latter are the more unhappy, and the nobler, of the two.

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When the aching heart grieves no more over any particular object, but is oppressed by life as a whole, it withdraws, as it were, into itself.  There is here a retreat and gradual extinction of the will, whereby the body, which is the manifestation of the will, is slowly but surely undermined; and the individual experiences a steady dissolution of his bonds,—­a quiet presentiment of death.  Hence the heart which aches has a secret joy of its own; and it is this, I fancy, which the English call “the joy of grief.”