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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within,
and those processes by which we render ourselves an
intelligent account of what we feel and do, and so represent
experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had
only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took
part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion
in their reflective being; and they passed throughout
turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction.
Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the
occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set
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