Peace At Eventide(excerpt) by Helen Keller

Music:
Comme au premier jour -André Gagnon

The Evening of life
Helen Keller
Excerpt from"Peace at Eventide"

The busy day of life is over.
Its pleasures, its duties, and its anxieties
have passed away. The sunshine and the shade,
which alternately marked its path, have alike disappeared;
and the soft tints of evening are gathered over the sky.

The evening of life!
Yes! life has its sunset hour,its twilight season.
The evening of life! Evening is the time for REST.
The little bird seeks its leafy roost; the rosy-cheeked
child throws aside its playthings and falls asleep;
the weary laborer comes home from his work.
The cares of the day are forgotten —
and all is hushed and quiet.

Never should the evening of life, any
more than the evening of a single day,
be thought of with fear. For evening is a
time for home-coming, and of peace. We
should say, as Tagore said: "The evening
sky to me is like a window, and a lighted
lamp, and a waiting behind it."
There is a comforting, a beautiful certainty
and serenity in those words.

It is a day bright with sunshine. Then,
from somewhere, unexpected, comes a veil
of mist and then another, until the face
of the sun is hid from us, and all is dark
before our eyes. Yet we never doubt for
a moment the sun is still there. Some poet
has said that Life itself is "A wisp of fog
between us and the sun.I think that is
true; I think that we — that the spirit-part
of us is eternal, that the Sun of true love
and happiness is eternal, and that life,
with its hurry, its bustle, its materialism,
comes between us and the Sun, like a wisp
of fog, a veiling cloud.

Often when the heart is torn with sor-
row, spiritually we wander like a traveler
lost in a deep wood. We grow frightened,
lose all sense of direction, batter ourselves
against trees and rocks in our attempt to
find a path.

Believe, when you are most unhappy,
that there is something for you to do in
the world. So long as you can sweeten an-
other's pain, life is not in vain.

We think too much of the darkness
of night and too little of the stars that
shine in it.

What we have once enjoyed we can
never lose. A sunset, a mountain bathed
in moonlight, the ocean in calm and in
storm — we see these, love their beauty,
hold the vision to our hearts. All that we
love deeply becomes a part of us. Our be-
loved ones are no more lost to us when
they die than if they were still laughing
and loving and working and playing at
our side. Truly, life is overlord of Death
and Love can never lose its own.