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What most observers failed to perceive in him was something quite bafflingly simple—a love of quietness, contemplation, and being alone.
“I am from the lamasery of Shangri-La.”
What sort of hell’s kitchen are we making for, that’s what I’d like to know?
“If you’d had all the experiences I’ve had, you’d know that there are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen.
washing-mangle,
Believe me, in arriving here the worst that can have happened is that we’ve exchanged one form of lunacy for another.
“If I were to put it into a very few words, my dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all lands—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.
we have found that the principle makes for a considerable degree of happiness. We rule with moderate strictness, and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. And I think I can claim that our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste, and moderately honest.”
Conway smiled. He thought it well expressed,
Yet to Conway it did not appear that the Eastern races were abnormally dilatory, but rather that Englishmen and Americans charged about the world in a state of continual and rather preposterous fever-heat. It was a point of view that he hardly expected any fellow Westerner to share, but he was more faithful to it as he grew older in years and experience.
These delicate perfections had an air of having fluttered into existence like petals from a flower. They would have maddened a collector, but Conway did not collect; he lacked both money and the acquisitive instinct. His liking for Chinese art was an affair of the mind; in a world of increasing noise and hugeness, he turned in private to gentle, precise, and miniature things.
“The jewel has facets,” said the Chinese, “and it is possible that many religions are moderately true.”
“Ah, but you see, we believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.”
Our people would be quite shocked by having to declare that one policy was completely right and another completely wrong.”
The whole game was doubtless going to pieces, but fortunately the players were not as a rule put on trial for the pieces they had failed to save.
The first quarter-century of your life was doubtless lived under the cloud of being too young for things, while the last quarter-century would normally be shadowed by the still darker cloud of being too old for them; and between those two clouds, what small and narrow sunlight illumines a human lifetime!
“Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue,” resumed the whisper.
Chang, I believe, explained to you our principle of moderation, and one of the things in which we are always moderate is activity.
I don’t talk much about it, the chief thing I’ve asked from the world since then is to leave me alone.
“I hope I am keeping well to your own rule of moderation.”
He looked back then on his long life, as I have already told you, and it seemed to him that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable, and that war, lust, and brutality might some day crush them until there were no more left in the world. He remembered sights he had seen with his own eyes, and with his mind he pictured others; he saw the nations strengthening, not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy; he saw their machine power multiplying until a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army of the Grand Monarque. And he perceived that when they had
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Believe me, that vision of old Perrault will come true. And that, my son, is why I am here, and why you are here, and why we may pray to outlive the doom that gathers around on every side.”
at all other times the horizon lifted like a curtain;
time expanded and space contracted,
“It is significant,” he said after a pause, “that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?”
Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?”
a calm intelligence which pleasantly overflowed into measured and well-balanced opinions.
one of the first steps toward the clarifying of the mind is to obtain a panorama of one’s own past, and that, like any other view, is more accurate in perspective. When you have been among us long enough you will find your old life slipping gradually into focus as though a telescope when the lens is adjusted. Everything will stand out still and clear, duly proportioned and with its correct significance.
The younger lamas are naturally preoccupied with the past; it is a necessary step to envisaging the future.”
“Perhaps the exhaustion of the passions is the beginning of wisdom,
CONWAY SAT ALONE IN the lantern-light. It seemed to him, in a phrase engraved on memory, that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable, that the two worlds were finally beyond reconciliation, and that one of them hung, as always, by a thread.
I suppose the truth is that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.”
People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.
there’s no denying the fact. You can’t subject a mere boy to three years of intense physical and emotional stress without tearing something to tatters. People would say, I suppose, that he came through without a scratch. But the scratches were there—on the inside.”
