| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 7 |
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We must have the shut door for all the most sacred experiences of life. Love will not reveal its holiest thoughts in public. Sorrow wants to be alone in its deepest moods. We wear masks before the world; only when the door is shut do we reveal our truest selves. There are moments and experiences in some deep human friendships when two souls are alone and come very close together. The door is shut upon the outside world. No stranger intermeddles. No eye looks in upon the sweet communion. No one hears what the two say one to the other. No tongue breaks in with any word upon the speech they are having together. Their communion seems really full and close.
Yet not even with the most faithful human friends is the intimacy ideally perfect. Not even our tenderest friends and those closest to us, says Keble, know half the reasons why we smile or sigh. Every human heart is a world by itself. We really know very little of what goes on in the brain and breast of the friend we most intimately know. You say you are perfectly acquainted with your friend. But you are not. You read his smiles, and you say, “My friend is very happy today.” But in his heart are cares and griefs of which you suspect nothing.
The marriage relation, when it is what it should be, represents the most complete blending of lives, and the most intimate mutual knowledge, the one of the other. “We tell each other everything,” says a happy husband or wife. “We have no secrets from one another. We know all that goes on in each other’s mind and heart.” But they do not, they cannot. There may not be any desire or intention to hide anything, one from the other. Yet a life is so large that no one can possibly understand it perfectly. We cannot know either all the good or all the evil in others. We cannot understand all the mystery there is in any friend’s life. We cannot understand the sorrow of our friend when the tears stream down his cheeks or his joy when his heart is overflowing with gladness.
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