Youth and life

by Randolph Bourne

... Ill THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OF LIFE Each season of life has its proper virtues, as each season of the year has its own climate and temperature. If virtue is the excellent working of the soul, then youth, middle age, and old age, all have their peculiar ways of working excellently. When we speak of a virtuous life, we should mean, not a life that has shown one single thread of motive and attitude running through it, but rather one that has varied with the seasons, as spring grows gently into summer and summer into autumn, each season working excellently in respect to the tilling and harvest of the soul. If it is a virtue to be contented in old age, it is no virtue to be contented in youth; if it is a virtue for youth to be bold and venturesome, it is the virtue of middle life to take heed and begin to gather up the lines and nets so daringly cast by youth into the sea of life. A virtuous life means a life responsive to its powers and its opportunities, a life not of inhibitions, but of a straining up to the limit of its strength. It means doing every year what is fitting to be done at that year to enhance or conserve one's own life or the happiness of those around one. Virtue is a word that abolishes duty. For duty has steadily fallen into worse and worse opprobrium; it has come to mean nothing but effort and stress. It implies something that is done rightly, but that cuts straight across the grain of all one's inclinations and motive forces. It is following the lines of greatest resistance; it is the working of the moral machine with the utmost friction possible. Now there is no doubt that the moral life involves struggle and effort, but it should be the struggle of adequate choice, and not of painful inhibition. We are coming to see...

364 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Randolph Silliman Bourne was a progressive writer and "leftist intellectual", and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work "The State," discovered after his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolp...