And simply to be born means that you are exposed to each one of those four winds. The winds do not often blow all the time, and they do not all blow at once. We can be thankful for that, but there is no shelter that will always protect you from them, no shelter at all, not even the crypt of the church. The crypt of this church has been designated as a fallout shelter in time of bombing, and perhaps there may be some degree of protection if we go there when the bombing starts. But for the kind of trouble that I am talking about, there is no protection, either in this part of the church or in the crypt.
Adverse winds are a part of life.
To be sure, you can never be prepared for them, not in one sense. Then go further and say to yourself, There are people who did their greatest work when they were blown by all four winds at once. John Keats, the English poet, is a perfect example. I have spoken about him a great many times this winter because it was in the early autumn that I read the Bate's Life, which is the great biography, written in 1963. Think now about John Keats as a young man and to what misfortunes he was exposed.