Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

by Will Durant

In the interim his wife has learned something of life, too. In the romantic years she had been a goddess; suddenly she finds that she is a cook. The discovery is discouraging. Why should she maintain the

Is it all this bleak do you think???? Is this hyperbole or reality? From my point of view this is, in fact a very old way of thinking. People married women quit their jobs and stayed home waiting for children to fill their lives, and their husbands felt that they were responsible financially to support the family. These days however, many women have sought and found Their place in life through a job, or a profession. In fact, in 2018 many families find it necessary for both husband and wife to be involved in a occupation because only one salary can not Support the household

Or she does not cook, and does not clean;

OR they have reinvented themselves as they emerged from the early passion to a team of two that complement each other. That look forward to the time together. That are continuing to remake themselves as they find new interests to share and explore.

patience to peripatetic novelists and philosophers.

And odd word for this context given the definition of traveling from place to place Traveling from place to place.

Perhaps here in the child, where one never thought to seek it, is the center of life, and the secret of content?

However there is danger thinking that a child makes the relationship stronger and more permanent. challenge Kimberly bowls the source of contentment. A Comment picked up from Kathy’s phone while I am dictating notes In fact a child can be both a source of pride and contentment in a marriage and/or a source of friction when there is disagreement about raising a child, when the child’s presence adds to tiredness and irritability of the mates. The presence of a child often has the unintended consequences of loss of sexual desire, diminished appetite for sex on a regular basis and sexual frustration on the part on one or both of the marriage partners

the subtle tragedy of a generation left rudely behind by a tumultuously changing world. Perhaps it is for such souls that the mills of the gods grind exceedingly slow, lest the mind of man should break under the strain of endless transformations.

a man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas. The ability to learn decreases with each

old age is eased by an apathy of sense and will, and nature slowly administers

sensations diminish in intensity, the sense of vitality fades; the desire for life gives way to indifference and patient waiting; the

Here are bereavements and broken hearts, and always the bitter brevity of love. Here still are the insolence of office

these youths with eager eyes will make the same errors as we, they will be misled by the same dreams; they will suffer, and wonder, and surrender, and grow old.

Only one thing is certain in history, and that is decadence; only one thing is certain in life, and that is death.

It is hard to praise life when life abandons us, and if we speak well of it even then it is because we hope we shall find it again, of fairer form, in some realm of disembodied and deathless souls.

We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever,

So wisdom may come as the gift of age, and seeing things in place, and every part in its relation to the whole, may catch that full perspective in which understanding pardons all. If it is one test of philosophy to give life a meaning that shall conquer death, wisdom will show that corruption comes only to the part, that life itself is deathless while we die.

Thirty generations passed, and Leonardo da Vinci, spirit made flesh, scratched across his drawings (drawings so beautiful that one catches one’s breath with pain on seeing them) plans and calculations for a flying machine, and left in his notes a little phrase that, once heard, rings like a bell in the memory—“There shall be wings.” Leonardo failed and died, but life carried on the dream. Generations passed, and men said man would never fly, for it was not the will of God. And then man flew, and the agelong challenge of the bird was answered. Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageable, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.

Here is an old man on the bed of death, harassed by helpless friends and wailing relatives. What a terrible sight it is—this thin frame with loosened and cracking flesh, this toothless mouth in a bloodless face, this

tongue that cannot speak and these eyes that cannot see! To this pass youth has come, after all its hopes and trials, to this pass middle age, after all its torment and its toil. To this pass health and strength and joyous rivalry (this...

For seventy years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart through suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; seventy years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, chokin...

Outside on the green boughs birds twitter gaily, and Chantecler sings his hymn to the sun. Light streams across the fields; buds open, and stalks confidently lift their heads; the sap mounts in the trees. Here are children; what i...

wet grass, laughing, calling, pursuing, eluding, panting for breath, inexhaustible? What energy, what spirit and happiness! What do they care about death? They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, wi...

These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope, these lofty

Now would seem an appropriate time to examine whether or not anything of us survives the apparent finality of our existence.

By matter I mean that which occupies space. Theoretical physics, which is becoming another

Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions—perceiving two objects at once,

Time, subjectively, is the

conscious sequence of perceptions—one after the other; objectively, it is the possibility of change.

By mind I mean the totality of perceptions, memories, and ideas in an organism, sometimes with consciousness thereof. A sensation is the feeling of an external stimulus or an internal condition. It may be unconscious and produce an unconscious reaction, as when you tickle the sole of

A sensation becomes a perception when awareness ascribes it to a cause or

Sensations, perceptions, memories, and ideas have material correlates in the nervous system, but they are something added to these correlates; it is this something ...

the “subconscious mind.” I would rather call this the physiological self—the storing, in our nervous system, of past (even prenatal, even racial) sensations, actions, desires, and fears. These can enter into our dreams, when there is no

By the soul, as distinct from the mind, I mean an inner directive and energizing force in every body, and in every cell and organ of a body.

“desiderium ipsa essentia hominis”—desire is the very essence of man.

Will is desire expressed in ideas that become actions unless impeded by contrary or substitute desires and ideas. Character is the sum of our desires, fears, propensities, habits, abilities, and ideas.

consciousness

See below

value is that it can serve as a rehearsal stage for testing diverse possible responses to a situation, imagining or forecasting the results of each potential response in the light of remembered experience, and letting the rehearsal affect the final action. Delayed reaction allows time

In humans, besides heredity, environment, and circumstance (the determinist trinity), there is the expansive, driving, “procreant urge” of the soul; growth would be unintelligible without it. In addition to mechanical forces operating

I do not know what modest measure of freedom and origination I enjoy, but when I introspect I see no mechanism, but ambition, desire, will. Desire, not experience, is the essence of life; experience becomes the tool of desire in the enlightenment of mind and the pursuit of ends.

We are among those parts of reality that can perceive—now in the body, now in the mind—both the

external form and the internal life.2 Though I am fond of my unique soul, I do not expect it to survive the complete death of my body. Death is the breakup of the human soul—i.e., of the life-giving, form-molding force—of an organism into those partial souls that animate individual parts

remain. But my soul as me is bound up with my organized and centrally directed body, and with my individual memories, desires, and character; it must suffer disintegration as my body decays.

am quite content with mortality;

I should be appalled at the thought of living forever, in whatever paradise. As I move on into my nineties my ambitions moderate, my zest in life wanes; soon I shall echo Caesar’s Jam satis vixi—“I have already lived enough.” When death comes in due time, after a life fully lived, it is forgivable and good. If in my last gasps I say anything contrary to this bravado, pay no attention to me. We must make room for our children.

You will not need to be told, now, that I am a theological skeptic, believing in neither the warlike God of the Hebrews nor the punishing and rewarding God of the Christians.

events that suggest, from a human point of view, a cruel instead of a kindly cosmic power,

There is so much suffering in the world, and so much of it apparently undeserved, so much war, destruction, crime, corruption, and savagery, even in religious organizations like the medieval Church, that one finds it hard to believe that all this exists by permission of an all-powerful and benevolent deity. And yet there have been millions of Christians who interpreted these evils as deliberately willed by their

Periodically, in history, man’s conception of God changes as man’s knowledge and moral sense improve; and these epochal transvaluations can upset not only philosophers and saints but also whole nations and

We live in such an age, when the revelations of science, and history, and the ethics of Christ, have made it impossible for developed minds to believe in that “grim beard of a God” who frightened our forbearers into decency.

avatars of God—the repeated death of an old god to make room for a deity fitted to the rising knowledge and moral level of a race. A list of the diverse gods that

From the moment when Copernicus announced that the Earth, which had been the footstool of God, was but a minimal fraction of the universe, the old tribal deity began to die, and men heard a voice commanding them to enlarge their idea of God to suit the universe that astronomy was opening to human view. Darwin furthered the transformation. As the astronomer had lost the Earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time,

It will sound like childish sentiment and poor poetry, but