throat and remind us, when it is time to die, that we have not yet begun to live.
It does seem to stand to reason that the soundest views of life should be expressed by men who refuse opiates and briskly manage their affairs and husband their moments in a shrewd wide-eyed awareness that they are under sentence of death.
But this bottom-of-the-cup realism, this straight unblinking look at The End—doesn't it freeze the heart, palsy enterprise, overcast heaven's blue and the verdure of earth and, in short, destroy both the illusion of seriousness and the reality of mirth in the play of the petites marionettes who make their trois petits tours and then go away? The traditional portion of his family, friends, and neighbors thought that it should.
When Llewelyn Powys was stricken—so he remembers it—they dealt with him in the manner established by Job's comforters for dealing with a man who has "got his." They engloomed his bedside with orthodox prayer and bungling condolence and mute bewilderment and the general lack of imaginative sympathy customary on such occasions. His father supplicated divine intervention. His mother, "who ever loved sorrow rather than joy," resented his purposed migration to Switzerland, wishing him to return to the family home—"to die there peacefully clinging to the Christian hope." One brother nervously betrayed his fear of infection. The old stonemason assured him that he had "a churchyard cough." And, amid these ministrations, he had transient moods—so he tells us with a devastating stroke of his irony—he had transient moods when, taking the sacrament in the parish church, he thought he might "become as a little child and go to heaven along with the Master of Corpus."
