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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: sunshine from the cloud of their life into the sudden agony of the
knowledge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a dream, and the
endurance of it as transient as the dew. But it is not always that,
even at such times of melancholy surprise, we can enter into any
true perception that this human life shares in the nature of it, not
only the evanescence, but the mystery of the cloud; that its avenues
are wreathed in darkness, and its forms and courses no less
fantastic, than spectral and obscure; so that not only in the vanity
which we cannot grasp, but in the shadow which we cannot pierce, it
is true of this cloudy life of ours, that "man walketh in a vain
shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain."
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