WHY this
endless work? Why each morning do we get up and wash and dress
ourselves, to undress ourselves at night and go to bed again? Why
do we work merely to earn money to buy food; and eat food so as to
gain strength that we may work? Why do we live, merely in the end
to say good-bye to one another? Why do we labour to bring children
into the world that they may die and be buried?
Of what use our mad striving, our passionate desire? Will it matter
to the ages whether, once upon a time, the Union Jack or the
Tricolour floated over the battlements of Badajoz? Yet we poured
our blood into its ditches to decide the question. Will it matter,
in the days when the glacial period shall have come again, to clothe
the earth with silence, whose foot first trod the Pole? Yet,
generation after generation, we mile its roadway with our whitening
bones. So very soon the worms come to us; does it matter whether we
love, or hate? Yet the hot blood rushes through our veins, we wear
out heart and brain for shadowy hopes that ever fade as we press
forward.
The flower struggles up from seed-pod, draws the sweet sap from the
ground, folds its petals each night, and sleeps. Then love comes to
it in a strange form, and it longs to mingle its pollen with the
pollen of some other flower.
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