The Complete Essays (151 page)

[As is shown by my votive tablet, I have hung up my dripping garments on the temple wall and dedicated them to the god of the sea.]
¹⁵⁷

It is time, now, to talk of this openly. But as I might say to someone now, ‘You are raving mad, my friend: love in these days of yours has nothing to do with fidelity and loyalty’ –

hæc si tu postules
Ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas,
Quam si des operam, ut cum ratione insanias

[if you try to reduce all this to rational rules you will simply give yourself the task of going rationally insane]

– so, on the other hand, if I had to start again, I would certainly adopt the same course and the same method, however fruitless that might prove for me. [C] Inexpertise and silliness are praiseworthy in an activity which deserves no praise. [B] The further I go from others’ humours in this, the nearer I draw to my own.

Incidentally, I never allowed all of myself to be totally devoted to this business. I took delight in it but I never forgot
me
: both in the ladies’ service and in mine I conserved, in its entirety, such little sense and discretion as Nature had allotted me: some passion but no raging madness. My conscience was compromised by it so far as to include lasciviousness and licentiousness, though never ingratitude, treachery, wickedness or cruelty. These are prices which I would not pay for the pleasures of this vice: I was happy to pay its proper honest price: [C]
‘Nullum inter se vitium est
.’
¹⁵⁸
[No vice is self-enclosed.] I have a virtually equal loathing of all cowering torpid idleness and all prickly painful bustle. One cuts into me, the other knocks me senseless: and I am no more fond of cuts than of bruises, of slashing blows than of blunt ones. In these affairs, when I was more fit for them, I found a just moderation between those two extremes. Love is a lively emotion, light-hearted and alert: I was neither confused nor afflicted by it but I was thrown into a heat by it and troubled. There you must stop: it is harmful only for fools.

When a youth asked Panaetius the philosopher whether it became a wise man to be in love, ‘Let us leave aside the wise,’ he replied, ‘neither you nor I are that; but let us not pledge ourselves to an activity so violent and disturbing, one which makes us the slave of another and despicable to ourselves.’
¹⁵⁹
He was telling the truth when he said that something so intrinsically impulsive should not be entrusted to a man’s soul if it has no means of withstanding its assaults and of disproving by its deeds the assertion of Agesilaus, that wisdom and love cannot live together.
¹⁶⁰

It is a vain pastime, it is true, indecorous, shaming and wrong; but I reckon that, treated in this fashion, it is health-bringing and appropriate for loosening up a sluggish mind and body; as a doctor I would order it for a
man of my mould and disposition as readily as any other prescription so as to liven him up and keep him in trim until he is well on in years and to postpone the onset of old age. While we are still only in its outskirts, while there is still life in our pulse,

Dum nova canities, dum prima et recta senectus,
Dum superest Lachesi quod torqueat, et pedibus me
Porto meis, nullo dextram subeunte bacillo,

[while the hair is but newly grey, while old age is still fresh and erect, while there is still some yarn for Lachesis to spin, while I can stand on my own feet without leaning on a stick,]
¹⁶¹

we have need of being stirred and thrilled by some such perturbation as that: just think how it restored youth, vigour and merriness to wise Anacreon. And Socrates, when older than I am, said, in talking of someone he loved, ‘When we touched shoulders and brought our heads together while looking at the same book I felt, I can assure you, a sudden jab in my shoulder like an insect’s sting: it went on irritating for five whole days and poured into my mind a ceaseless longing.’
¹⁶²
– A mere touch, by chance, on the shoulder, was enough to warm and disturb a soul chilled and enervated by age, a soul which was foremost among all human souls in its re-formation.
¹⁶³
[C] And why not? Socrates was a man: he never wanted to be, or to seem to be, anything else.

[B] Philosophy does not do battle against such pleasures as are natural, provided that temperance accompanies them:
¹⁶⁴
[C] she teaches moderation in such things not avoidance; [B] her powers of resistance are used against bastard unnatural pleasures. She says that the body’s desires must not be augmented by the mind and cleverly warns us [C] not to seek to stimulate our hunger by sating it, not to seek to stuff our bellies instead of filling them, as well as to avoid any enjoyment which brings us to penury,
all meats which increase hunger and all drinks that increase thirst, [B] just as
¹⁶⁵
in the service of love she orders us to take a person who simply satisfies the needs of the body and who does not disturb the soul; the soul must not make love its concern, but follow nakedly along, accompanying the body.
¹⁶⁶

But am I not right to think that these precepts – which are by my standard nevertheless a trifle rigorous
¹⁶⁷
– concern a body which is functioning properly, and that for a broken-down body (as for a prostrate stomach) we are allowed to use the art of medicine to prop it up and put a little heat into it by means of our imagination so as to restore its appetite and joy, since, left to itself, it has lost them for good? May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart; and that it seems reasonable that we should adopt towards the enjoyment of pleasure at least as favourable an attitude as we do towards pain? Pain for example was vehement to the point of perfection in the Soul of the saints doing penance; the body naturally took part in it by right of the links binding it to her; yet it could have had little part in the cause.
¹⁶⁸
But the saints were by no means content that the body should ‘follow nakedly along, accompanying’ the afflicted soul: they afflicted such horrifying punishment on it as was proper to it, in order that both body and soul should emulate each other, plunging the whole man into pain, most salutary when most atrocious.

[C] So, in the parallel case of bodily pleasures, is it not unjust to chill the Soul towards them and to maintain that she should be dragged towards them as to some compelling obligation or some slavish need? It is for the Soul, rather, to keep them warm like a broody hen and, since she has the responsibility of governing them, to come forward and welcome them;
just as in my opinion it is also her duty in the case of such pleasures as are proper to her to inject and pour into the body every sense-impression which their attributes allow and to see that they are made sweet to it and salutary. For it is, as they say, right that the body should never follow its appetites to the prejudice of the Soul. Why is it not right, then, that the Soul should not follow hers to the prejudice of the body?

[B] I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; [C] it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopelessness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: [B] it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, [C] from a thousand melancholy sorrows [B] which idleness burdens us with in old age, [C] as does the poor state of our health; [B] it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood – this blood of mine which Nature is foresaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews [C] as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul [B] for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing towards disintegration.

But I am well aware that love is a good thing very hard to recover. Our tastes have, through weakness, become more delicate and, through experience, more discriminating. We demand more when we have less to offer: we want the maximum of choice just when we least deserve to find favour. Realizing we are thus, we are less bold and more suspicious; knowing our own circumstances – and theirs – nothing can assure us we are loved.

I feel shame for myself to be found among fresh-green, boiling youth

Cujus in indomito constantior inguine nervus,
Quam nova collibus arbor inhæret.

[in whose indomitable groin there is a tendon firmer far than a young tree planted on the hillside.]
¹⁶⁹

Why should we go and show our wretchedness among such eager joy,

Possint ut juvenes visere fervidi,
Multo non sine risu,
Dilapsam in cineres facem?

[so that burning youth, not without many a laugh, may see our nuptial torch decayed into ashes?]

They have strength and reason on their side; let us make room for them; we can hold out no longer.

[C] That sprig of budding beauty will not suffer itself to be handled by hands benumbed, nor seduced by purely material means. For, as that ancient philosopher replied to one who was laughing at him for being unable to win the favour of some tendril he was pursuing: ‘My friend, the hook will not bite when the curd is so fresh.’
¹⁷⁰

[B] Now love is a commerce which requires inter-relationship and reciprocity. We can show our appreciation of the other pleasures we receive by recompenses of a different nature: this one can only be repaid in the same coin. [C] Truly in this one the pleasure that I give stimulates my imagination more sweetly than the pleasure I receive. [B] A man who can receive pleasure when he gives none at all is in no wise generous: it is a base soul which will owe the lot and is pleased to nurse contacts with women who do all the paying. There is no beauty nor grace nor intimacy so exquisite that a gentleman should want them at that price. If they can only do us a good turn out of pity, then I would dearly prefer not to live at all than to live on charity. Would that I had the right to ask it of them in the style which I have seen beggars use in Italy:
‘Fate ben per voi’
[Do a good turn for yourself]; [C] or in the manner which Cyrus adopted to exhort his soldiers: ‘He who loves himself, let him follow me.’
¹⁷¹

[B] Someone will say to me: ‘Go back again to women who are now in the same state as you are: fellowship in the same misfortune will make them easier to get.’ What absurd and dull terms for a truce!

Nolo
Barbam vellere mortuo leoni!

[I have no desire to pluck hairs from a dead lion’s beard!]
¹⁷²

[C] One of the reproaches and accusations that Xenophon makes about Meno is that in his love-affairs he only got on the job with partners past their bloom.
¹⁷³
The sight of a young couple appropriately united in a tender embrace – or even the contemplation of it in imagination – contains I believe more sensual pleasure than being the second partner in a sad misshapen union. [B] I leave that fanciful appetite to the Emperor Galba who devoted himself only to tough and ancient flesh – or to that other pitiful wretched man:

O ego di’ faciant talem te cernere possim,
        Charaque mutatis oscula ferre comis,
Amplectique meis corpus non pingue lacertis!

[O would the gods let me see you as you are, tenderly kiss your fading hair and clasp your withered body in my embrace!]
¹⁷⁴

[C] And I count among the principal forms of ugliness all beauties due to artifice and constraint. A young lad of Chio called Hemon, hoping that fine clothes would procure him that handsomeness which Nature had denied him, came to the philosopher Arcesilaus and asked him if a philosopher could ever find himself in love. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘provided it be not with a dishonest dressed-up beauty such as yours.’
¹⁷⁵
An ugly old age when openly avowed is in my opinion less old and less ugly than one smoothed out and painted over.

[B] Shall I say it, on condition that you do not jump down my throat? Love never seems to me to be properly and naturally seasonable except in the age nearest boyhood:

Quem si puellarum insereres choro,
Mille sagaces falleret hospites
     Discrimen obscurum, solutis
        Crinibus ambiguoque vultu.

[A youth such that, if you put him among a band of maidens, those who knew
him not, for all their perspicacity, would fail to pick him out with his flowing hair and his hermaphrodite’s face.]
¹⁷⁶