“I felt like that once, when I was young. It was the blackest day of my life. That’s another story, I’ll tell you about it one day. The point is, it wasn’t only my blackest, it was also my best. Well, when I was a little boy, we used to live in a little house that was perched halfway up the top a mountain. And behind our house, there sat under a tree an old man, a hermit, a monk. He lived under this tree for half his lifetime, so they said, and learned the secret of life. So when my black day came, I went and asked him to help me.
I’ll never forget what it was like up there: all bleak and cold, it was. A few bare rocks with some weeds sprouting from them, and some pathetic little patches of sludgy snow. The rest was just grey. Grey grey grey. Well, the tree the old man sat under, that was ancient and twisted. The man himself, he was as brittle and dry as a leaf in the autumn.
(What did he say?) Nothing. Not a word. He just sat there silently, expressionless and he listened while I poured out my troubles to him. I was too unhappy even for tears, I remember. And when I’d finished, he lifted a skeltial hand and he pointed. Do you know what he pointed at? A flower, one of those little weeds. Just like a daisy, it was. Well, I looked at it for a moment, and suddenly I saw it through his eyes. It simply glowing with life, like a perfectly cut jewel!
And the colours! The colours were deeper and richer than anything you could possibly imagine. It was the dasiyiest daisy I’d ever seen. (That was the secret of life: a daisy.) I laughed too, when I first heard it. So later I got up, and I ran down that mountain and found that the rocks weren’t grey at all, they were red and brown and purple and gold. Those pathetic little patches of sludgy snow were shining white, shining white in the sunlight!”