"Children's Books - Defoe, Daniel - Further Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Children's Books)

When she was gone, the world looked awkwardly round me. I was as
much a stranger in it, in my thoughts, as I was in the Brazils,
when I first went on shore there; and as much alone, except for the
assistance of servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what
to think nor what to do. I saw the world busy around me: one part
labouring for bread, another part squandering in vile excesses or
empty pleasures, but equally miserable because the end they
proposed still fled from them; for the men of pleasure every day
surfeited of their vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and
repentance; and the men of labour spent their strength in daily
struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured
with: so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to
work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end
of wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily
bread.

This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom, the island;
where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it;
and bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them; where
the money lay in the drawer till it grew mouldy, and had scarce the
favour to be looked upon in twenty years. All these things, had I
improved them as I ought to have done, and as reason and religion
had dictated to me, would have taught me to search farther than
human enjoyments for a full felicity; and that there was something
which certainly was the reason and end of life superior to all