"The wisdom of the world is this. To say, There is
No other wisdom but to gulp what time can give.
To guard no inward vision winged with mysteries;
To hear no voices haunt the hurrying hours we live;
To keep no faith with ghostly friends; never to know
Vigils of sorrow crowned when loveless passions fade...
From wisdom such as this to find my gloom I go,
Companioned by those powers who keep me unafraid."
This is a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, one of those famous WWI poets. The First World War, where the flower of England - and of the other countries - went, carried on the wings of illusions, and perished - or came back utterly changed. And what resulted from this experience was either the swinging twenties, with the insatiable drive to gulp down all of the ephemerality of life; or, on the other hand, perhaps a renewed understanding of the meaning of one's time, of the time given to us (see above). Indeed, in those miserable trenches, in frozen mud, surviving day after day of monotonous deathly dread, one was faced with brutal immediacy with the question about the end (or, what Thomas More and many others in the tradition called "the four last things"). More simply put; one was inevitably and physically faced with the need to look at one's life "from the end backwards," and of re-valuing and re-evaluating it from that perspective: how one has lived, and how one lives. And, if not right then and there in the trenches, where one's main duty and worry was survival, then thereafter, or in a time of quiet.
As indicated in the poem, what results from such a glance backwards from the end is an apparently paradoxical conclusion. That hanging on in despair to the perishable fruits of the fleeing moment is actually the recipe of sorrow; and that the hanging on to the truths that transcend the immediate minute is the path of everlasting hope.
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