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In the third book of The Prelude we find a dispassionate account of student life, with its trivial occupations, its pleasures and general aimlessness. Wordsworth proved to be a very ordinary scholar, following his own genius rather than the curriculum, and looking forward more eagerly to his vacation among the hills than to his examinations.
The inexorable flight of time; the approach of old age and its infirmities; the shadow of death; the mystery that surrounds our being; the contrast between the depth of affection and the transitoriness and uncertainty of life; the spectacle of the broken lives and baffled aspirations and useless labours and misdirected talents and pernicious energies and long-continued delusions that fill the path of human history; the deep sense of vanity and aimlessness that must sometimes come over us as we contemplate a world in which chance is so often stronger than wisdom; in which desert and reward are so widely separated; in which living beings succeed each other in such a vast and bewildering redundance eating, killing, suffering, and dying for no useful discoverable purpose, all these things belong to the normal lot or to the inevitable setting of human life.
Always when I write to you odds and ends come to mind, smacking of local colour. After an attack some months ago I met a solitary private wandering across a shell-torn field, I watched him and thought something was wrong by the aimlessness of his progress. When I spoke to him, he looked at me mistily and said, "Dead men. Moonlit road."
There are different sets, of course fashionable, political, artistic but the people in them are all crossing over, all advancing and retiring, with the same apparent aimlessness, or setting to partners." "There is occasionally an aim in that." Charles smiled grimly. "They follow the music in that as in everything else.
Thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of the insignificance and transitoriness of the visible world, Solomon's 'vanity of vanities' have been, and are to this day, the highest and final stage in the realm of thought. The thinker reaches that stage and comes to a halt! There is nowhere further to go.
Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims, whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still alive the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it all slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature.
A certain aimlessness of purpose which had troubled him during the last few months had disappeared. He had found an object in life. "To-day," Hamel declared, as he stood at the sideboard the following morning at breakfast-time and helped himself to bacon and eggs, "I am positively going to begin reading. I have a case full of books down at the Tower which I haven't unpacked yet."
The very aimlessness with which it proceeds, the serene disregard of all considerations of profit and propriety with which it follows its wandering course, and brings up anywhere or nowhere, to camp for the night, is one of its attractions.
And Ruth, whom he had thought he understood, revelled in it all. At first he tried to get at her point of view, to discover what she found to enjoy in this lunatic existence of aimlessness and futility. One night, as they were driving home from a dinner which had bored him unspeakably, he asked the question point-blank.
In the morning a mysterious man with a large white face, crooked spectacles and a crooked tie, and a suggestion of thinking all the time of something else, or of nothing at all, mysteriously drifted into the house, drifted about it with apparent complete aimlessness of purpose, and presently showed himself to Sabre as about to drift out of it again.
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