Measure of My Days Read Online Free PDF

are uncertain, our minds tired by doubt.
    And our neighbour—our neighbour who is crowding us very close these days—what of him, who is he? I have never been sure whether he was the kind people who are near and trusted, and of course the railway porter who can on occasion be a ministering angel, and naturally all the people in the shops, for if you live in a small town and are really old you wonder who is not your neighbour. But is my neighbour the lout I observe, or the author I read when I am advised to “keep up with the times”—he who expresses spleen for spleen’s sake—for these I cannot love. Is the plain fact then that our neighbour is often not easy to love, and most of the time we do not love him? What is more, out of honesty to him, and to oneself, we judge both him and ourselves; we must, in order to know our dislikes and his, or how else is there any reality? If we do not recognise our instinctive recoil (and sometimes it is the wise animal in us giving warning), how are we to have the courage to take our stand? If we are judged, if we do not feel the recoil from us, then what is there to make us pause and judge ourselves?
    The cry for an egalitarian society is so strong that it may be the new and needed truth, but the opposing truth flames in my heart, and difference, the precious difference of the individual, sharpens in my thoughts. The difference that is innate in nature—nature whose law is diversity—the difference that is also our most difficult achievement and chief honour must have full recognition or else equality becomes uniformity. It is the individual who can stand alone that can best relate to another person, it is he who can be true to a bond, and it is he who possesses a creative mind. Anyone who has become himself will respect himself for his difference and so be respected by all. But this is not equality. Only identical things are equal, and nature is incapable of repeating herself, great artist that she is, so what is the cry for equality, and what will it bring?
    W e are different
, not equal, so we suffer and compete, rise and fall, lose and achieve ourselves.We are truly the vehicles of evolution because under stress we make a decisive choice that creates change, enforced by necessity. Necessity can be cruel, and any generous heart and just mind tries to control the inequalities of circumstance. Great good can come from greater equality, less suffering, a flowering of new talent, new pride, increase in understanding, but there is also a danger now seen and weighed. It is the decrease of individuality on a large scale.
    Unreal inequality can stimulate to action, but unreal equality seems to dissolve us and distort us. We tend to live at the collective level, undefined, unreal because of claims in our natures that we have not fulfilled, because of differences we have evaded. This is recognised as a present danger, and the word “depersonalized” is used to describe it.
    Thoughtful writers in America dwell on the degree of emptiness reached there, middle-aged couples are frightened children, afraid to be alone, only able to live by melting into their Club, their neighbours. English analysts are burdened and baffled by what they call the non-egopatient, people who are not pathological, but who lack the ability to live their own lives, needing to be carried. It is understandable to assume that fewer differences would mean less suffering, but it is dangerous to create large numbers of people whose first claim is to avoid the inner struggle, the ordeal of self-discovery.
    Modern permissiveness makes it difficult to tell good from bad, as though it were simpler to have no differences at all. We used to dislike and condemn our own faults when we saw them in others, so that we parked out our sins on our neighbours where they at least existed for us. Now that it is uncertain when a fault is a fault our vagueness increases. Add to evasion and uncertainty the fact that we tend to annul the