Forbidden fruit a flavor has that lawful orchard mock; Heaven is what I cannot reach! The apple on the tree, provided it do hopeless hang, that Heaven is, to me. The color on the cruising cloud, the interdicted ground behind the hill, the house behind, –there Paradise found! A Word is dead when it is said, I just beings to live that day. I can wade grief, whole pools of it, –I am used to that. However, the least push of joy breaks up my feet, and I tip—drunken. Let no faces smile, it was the new liquor, –that was all!  Power is only pain, stranded, through discipline, until weights hang. Give balm to giants, and they will wilt, like men. Give Himmaleh, –they will carry him! The cycles of rest, production, consumption, and interaction are as much part of how we experience life as our senses—vision, hearing, and so forth—are. Because the nervous system is so constructed that it can only process a small amount of information at any given moment, most of what we can experience must be serially, one thing after the other.  

If we want to put our heart into it, we can usually only fully focus our full undivided attention on reading one paper at a time, listening to one song at a time, swallowing one bite, and having one conversation at a time. Thus the limitations of attention, which determines the amount of psychic energy we have for experiencing the World, provide an inflexible script for us to live by. Do not take revenge, my dear friends and family, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: It is mine to avenge; I will repay. Instead, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In doing this, you have removed any curse from yourself and put it on them. Across time and in different cultures, what people do and for how long is astonishingly similar. Having just said that, in some important respects, all lives are similar, one must hasten to recognize the obvious differences. How a person lives usually depends in a large part on gender, age, and social position.  A boy of six or seven, born into a poor family in one of the industrial regions of England two hundred years ago, was likely to wake up around five in the morning, rush to the mills to service the clanking mechanical looms until midnight, six or seven days a week. Often he would die of exhaustion before reaching summer sixteen.  

A girl of twelve in the silk-making regions of France around the same time would sit next to a tub all day, dipping silkworm cocoons in scalding water to melt the sticky substance that held the threads together. She was likely to succumb to respiratory diseases as she sat in wet clothes from dawn to dusk, and her fingertips eventually lost all feeling from hot water. In the meantime, the children of the nobility learned to dance the minuet and converse in foreign languages. The same differences in life-changes are still with us. What can a child born into an urban slum in Los Angeles, Detroit, Cairo Egypt, or Mexico City expect to experience during a lifetime? How is that going to differ from the expectations of a child born into an affluent American suburb, or a well-to-do Swedish or Swiss family?  Unfortunately, there is no justice, nor any rhyme nor reason, in one person being born into a starving community, perhaps even with a congenital physical defect, while another starts life with good looks, good health, and a large bank account. So while the main parameters of life are fixed, and no person can avoid resting, eating, interacting, and doing at least some work, humanity is divided into social categories that determine to a large extent the specific content of experience. And to make it all more interesting, there is, of course, the matter of individuality.