Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. “And the goblins-they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or ex-President Roosevelt, would say yes. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.” It is unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is no that of a man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.

Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. “Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians.

Howard's end em forster