R.H. Blyth is making fun of me, but a dart so specifically honed must have been also turned back on himself.
Is the world bad, or Bad? Thomas Hardy thought it was Bad, and that for this very reason it gives us an opportunity for tragic integrity. If the world is Bad, let each man do zazen and get his satori, play and listen to the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues; paint pictures and look at the best of others daily; learn the most distant foreign language, and read its poetry in the original; build his own house, or at least a dog-kennel; climb hills or high trees, or join the fire-brigade; be a vegetarian and an out-and-out (impossible) pacifist. If a man cannot do these things, he may creep in a petty pace to death, or jump out of the window. A spiritually dead or unborn man makes the greatest art and religion look what it is anyhow, foolish.
