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Folly Sweetens Men's Greatest Misfortunes
And now I think you see what would become of the world if all men
should be wise; to wit it were necessary we got another kind of clay
and some better potter. But I, partly through ignorance, partly
unadvisedness, and sometimes through forgetfulness of evil, do now and
then so sprinkle pleasure with the hopes of good and sweeten men up in
their greatest misfortunes that they are not willing to leave this
life, even then when according to the account of the destinies this
life has left them; and by how much the less reason they have to live,
by so much the more they desire it; so far they are from being
sensible of the least wearisomeness of life. Of my gift it is, that
you have so many old Nestors everywhere that have scarce left them
so much as the shape of a man; stutterers, dotards, toothless,
gray-haired, bald; or rather, to use the words of Aristophanes,
"Nasty, crumpled, miserable, shriveled, bald, toothless, and wanting
their baubles": yet so delighted with life and to be thought young
that one dyes his gray hairs; another covers his baldness with a
periwig; another gets a set of new teeth; another falls desperately in
love with a young wench and keeps more flickering about her than a
young man would have been ashamed of. For to see such an old crooked
piece with one foot in the grave to marry a plump young wench, and
that too without a portion, is so common that men almost expect to
be commended for it.
But the best sport of all is to see our old women, even dead with
age, and such skeletons one would think they had stolen out of their
graves, and ever mumbling in their mouths, "Life is sweet;" and as old
as they are, still caterwauling, daily plastering their face, scarce
ever from the glass, gossiping, dancing, and writing love letters.
These things are laughed at as foolish, as indeed they are; yet
they please themselves, live merrily, swim in pleasure, and in a
word are happy, by my courtesy. But I would have them to whom these
things seem ridiculous to consider with themselves whether it be not
better to live so pleasant a life in such kind of follies, than, as
the proverb goes, "to take a halter and hang themselves." Besides
though these things may be subject to censure, it concerns not my
fools in the least, inasmuch as they take no notice of it; or if
they do, they easily neglect it. If a stone fall upon a man's head,
that's evil indeed; but dishonesty, infamy, villainy, ill reports
carry no more hurt in them than a man is sensible of; and if a man
have no sense of them, they are no longer evils. What are you the
worse if the people hiss at you, so you applaud yourself? And that a
man be able to do so, he must owe it to folly.
But methinks I hear the philosophers opposing it and saying 'tis
a miserable thing for a man to be foolish, to err, mistake, and know
nothing truly. Nay rather, this is to be a man. And why they should
call it miserable, I see no reason; forasmuch as we are so born, so
bred, so instructed, nay such is the common condition of us all. And
nothing can be called miserable that suits with its kind, unless
perhaps you'll think a man such because he can neither fly with birds,
nor walk on all four with beasts, and is not armed with horns as a
bull. For by the same reason he would call the warlike horse
unfortunate, because he understood not grammar, nor ate
cheese-cakes; and the bull miserable, because he'd make so ill a
wrestler. And therefore, as a horse that has no skill in grammar is
not miserable, no more is man in this respect, for that they agree
with his nature.
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