ABRUPTO

09:17 (JPP)

EARLY MORNING BLOGS

2242

"Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by their greatest men: by great readers, great statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life is short. You have heard as much before; - yet have you measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that - that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your own claims to respect that you jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entree here, and audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the Dead."

(John Ruskin)