Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/57

 needs to do is to re-examine his metaphors. Let us try our hammer on this "solid character."

We spend our lives in a quarry of words. We immure ourselves behind a wall of images. We talk of characters; immediately the mallet and chisel are in our hands. We are sculptors, and our subjects are unhewn blocks of marble, and the form we seek is imposed from without. The chips fly. Chips of what? Is the imposition of marble qualities upon flesh and blood responsible for that grim and weary and hopeless look of the Old Man of the Mountain, which establishes itself at middle age upon faces once mobile and rosy? Has this entire theory of human sculpture a bearing upon the prevalence of ennui, rigor mortis, premature death, and petrification at forty? Is there a gleam of hope in a change of images?

"He built his house on a rock." Is that the best place for a house? Not if one cares for gardening. At forty, one is justified at least in enquiring whether what looked like a white rock was only a ribbon of foam. There is current an alternative set of images, which takes us out of the stone-quarry and the graveyard and away from the tedious refrain, Requiescat in pace.

Our lives are a bright-flowing mist of days and nights. Our blood is a swift-winding river. Our flesh is a changing flower. There is a season of buds and a season of fruit and a season of wine and perfume. And after the vintage, there are memories and dreams.