The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic.  Looked at close, they produce no effect.  There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.  So, to gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.  We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal.  Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim:  they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed, was just the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time.  Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!

Then again, how insatiable a creature is man!  Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.  And why is this?  The real reason is simply that, taken in itself, Will is the lord of all worlds:  everything belongs to it, and therefore no one single thing can ever give it satisfaction, but only the whole, which is endless.  For all that, it must rouse our sympathy to think how very little the Will, this lord of the world, really gets when it takes the form of an individual; usually only just enough to keep the body together.  This is why man is so very miserable.

Life presents itself chiefly as a task—­the task, I mean, of subsisting at all, gagner sa vie.  If this is accomplished, life is a burden, and then there comes the second task of doing something with that which has been won—­of warding off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure from need.  The first task is to win something; the second, to banish the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden.

Human life must be some kind of mistake.  The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.  This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life?  If life—­the craving for which is the very essence of our being—­were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all:  mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.  But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something; and then distance and difficulties to be overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us—­an illusion which vanishes when we reach it; or else