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Updated: May 27, 2025
So that, when he steps out of hospital, you shall not have to begin to train one who for months, perhaps years, has been living, mindless and will-less, the life of a half-dead creature." That this is a hard task none who knows hospital life can doubt. That it needs special qualities and special effort quite other than the average range of hospital devotion is obvious.
When he, finally, had fully mastered this art, it served him for a long time as a pleasant and entertaining athletic game of its own kind. But that, too, passed away. He reached, in, the end, the stage where he felt himself a will-less, mechanical wheel in a general machine consisting of five men and an endless chain of flying watermelons. Now he was number two.
The sorrow, the remorse of repentance, they do not so much regard: it is the action it involves; it is the having to turn, be different, and do differently, that they shrink from; and they have been taught to believe that this will not be required of them there in that awful refuge of the will-less.
Is there somewhere in the immensities some responsive kindliness, some faint hope of toleration and assistance, something sensibly on our side against death and mechanical cruelty? If so, it certainly refuses to pamper us.... But if the whole thing is cruel, perhaps also it is witless and will-less? One cannot imagine the ruler of everything a devil that would be silly.
I did not hold myself responsible in this will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then, evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but the evil effect? Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite shore.
Yet I have a will-less power of love which will conquer through me, and which, O gracious Lord, I never dreamt of before." In the middle of the above entry he thus notes an interruption, and records a lesson taught by the late New England spring: "George and Burrill Curtis came in, and I have just returned from a walk in the woods with them.
They stood in lines, unmoving, without speech among themselves, men who might have been frozen into immobility and arranged so for some game in which they were the voiceless, will-less pieces. And their immobility was a thing to arouse fear. Were they dead and still standing? "Come!" Karara's voice had sunk to a whisper and her hand pulled at the men. "What ?" began Ross. Ashe shook his head.
Where was he with her? what were his real, tangible hopes and fears? Life and death depended for him on these days these few vanishing days. And he was like one of the last year's leaves before him, whirled helpless and will-less in the dust-storm of the road! He had sat there an unnoticed time when the sound of some heavy carriage approaching roused him.
He was aware that he was becoming fascinated by her eyes, and he felt that with every moment it was growing harder for him to close his own, or to look away from her, and then, an instant later, he knew that it would be impossible. Yet he made no effort. He was passive, indifferent, will-less, and her gaze charmed him more and more.
And this surrender was early followed by weakness of her disused body. She also surrendered to the weakness of self-pity, that craven mocker of self-respect. She was not a will-less girl, but life had brought her small chance to develop that will which masters, while wilfulness, that will which demands selfishly for self, grew out of the soil so largely of her mother's preparing.
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