Are you tasting the apples, the rare lusciousness of grapes, peaches, oranges, plums, and the thousand and one delicate fruits _now_, or are you regretting the lost truffles, the sauces, the spices, the wines, the stimulating things of yesterday, or longing for the Lucullus repasts of to-morrow?
Oh, the content and happiness of taking joys as they come, in their simpleness and naturalness, in their every-day, common, normal order; of looking for them, expecting them, anticipating them, going out, as it were, to meet them.
Is it only a walk of ten blocks (or five) to the store, or office, or school? Are you ready as you step out of your door to inhale the fragrance of the morning air, or enjoy its own peculiar delight if the morning is wet, misty, foggy, rainy? Do you see the moving and sun-lit clouds; the clear sky, the rustling leaves of the trees; the hopping of the happy birds; the joyousness of the children walking to school?
Be alert, receptive, ready. Seize the _small joy of the now_, and you will find it far more delightful than all the anticipations, and even the realizations of what seem to be the _large joys of the to-morrow_.
One of the saddest pictures on canvas to me is one called "The Pursuit of Pleasure." It represents a female figure as _Pleasure_, floating through the air, and followed by an eager crowd of men and women, of all ages and conditions in life. Reaching, grasping, breathless, regardless of their tramplings upon each other, indifferent that some of their whilom companions are fallen and cannot arise, and that hopeless despair is depicted in their eyes and faces, each and all of the remaining strugglers fix their eyes upon the phantom though alluring figure. And thus the pursuit goes on continuously; there is no reaching her; she is ever illusive and evasive, a delusion and a snare, ever beckoning yet ever retreating.
In her sculptured fountain at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney expresses the same idea, but even more forcefully than does the picture. Here are thirty-seven figures nearly all intent upon reaching their goal of happiness. They cannot even see what it is. Yet the eagerness depicted upon the faces, in the straining attitudes, the strenuous striving in that one direction, all typify the desire, the intentness, the resolute pursuit of happiness. Then, alas, when the doors are reached, they are both found closed, guarded by Assyrian and Egyptian figures, that suggest the occult mystery of the beyond, and that look down sternly and unyieldingly upon the two figures at their feet, long strivers, evidently pleading for the admission that is denied them. There are two definite, distinct, and different ways in which these two allegories can be interpreted. One is that mankind ever lives in the world of the senses, pursuing the gratifications of the now, the feastings, the drinkings, the carousings, the pleasuring, the wantonings of the sense-life, the sensual life, and that such a pursuit is ever doomed to failure, for man--the spiritual, created in God's own image--can never be satisfied with the temporary things of earth and sense.