Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/17

 energies on objects which make no adequate returns. You find that a bare twenty-five per cent. of your activities are yielding you durable satisfactions, while seventy-five per cent. of them are yielding only fatigue and regret. Or you find that you are mainly occupied with things which divert and amuse you to-day, but don't last. To-morrow they are gone; there is nothing there; you aren't accumulating anything. You aren't growing richer with the years, as you feel that you ought to grow, but are as poor as ever. But if you know clearly what the durable satisfactions of your life are, you know how to revise your business and your pleasure. You know what to keep and what to cut away. You have something definite to aim at. Your activities take a common direction. You feel all your powers, like a well-trained team, pulling together towards a known destination, pulling you home, home to the object of your heart's inmost desire. And so I think that, for both young people and old people, one of the most profitable questions is this: "What are the durable satisfactions of life?"

I used not to get much response to that question either. People used not to be very curious about it. They took it for granted that life has some durable satisfactions; but they hadn't considered the subject; and they thought me rather queer to pry into anything so intimate and so unexplored. Since the late war, however, there has been a great change in that respect. Nowadays, everyone is asking my question. The great war and its consequences have