4759. LIFE, Reliving.—[continued].
Putting to myself your
question, would I agree to live my seventy-
three years over again forever? I hesitate to
say. With Chew's limitations from twenty-five
to sixty, I would say yes; and I might go
further back, but not come lower down. For,
at the latter period, with most of us, the powers
of life are sensibly on the wane; sight becomes
dim, hearing dull, memory constantly enlarging
its frightful blank and parting with all we have
ever seen or known, spirits evaporate, bodily
debility creeps on palsying every limb, and so
faculty after faculty quits us, and where, then, is
life? If, in its full vigor, of good as well as
evil, your friend Vassall could doubt its value,
it must be purely a negative quantity when its
evils alone remain. Yet I do not go into his
opinion entirely. I do not agree that an age
of pleasure is no compensation for a moment
of pain. I think, with you, that life is a fair
matter of account, and the balance often, nay
generally, in its favor. It is not indeed easy,
by calculation of intensity and time, to apply a
common measure, or to fix the par between
pleasure and pain; yet it exists, and is measurable.—
To John Adams. Washington ed. vii, 26.
(M.
Aug. 1816)
