things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past
back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with
while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence
most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life,
will find that all along they have been living _ad interim_: they will
be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let
slip by unenjoyed, was just the life in the expectation of which they
passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope
made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!

Then again, how insatiable a creature is man! Every satisfaction he
attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to
the wishes of each individual will. And why is this? The real reason
is simply that, taken in itself, Will is the lord of all worlds:
everything belongs to it, and therefore no one single thing can ever
give it satisfaction, but only the whole, which is endless. For all
that, it must rouse our sympathy to think how very little the Will,
this lord of the world, really gets when it takes the form of an
individual; usually only just enough to keep the body together. This
is why man is so very miserable.

Life presents itself chiefly as a task--the task, I mean, of
subsisting at all, _gagner sa vie_. If this is accomplished, life is a
burden, and then there comes the second task of doing something with
that which has been won--of warding off boredom, which, like a bird
of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure
from need. The first task is to win something; the second, to banish
the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden.

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be
sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of
needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are
satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing
remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that
existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the
feeling of the emptiness of life? If life--the craving for which
is the very essence of our being--were possessed of any positive
intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere
existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we ar