The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see
himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city
street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope.
In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces,
the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform - for there, on the most
thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will
continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the
forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to
the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot
bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
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