In studying the morning crepuscules of Love, we have involuntarily
outlined the first phases of Love. We have seen him timid and spasmodic,
exerting himself between the swaddling clothes of infancy and the first
weapons of arrogant youth, like a boy warrior armed with a wooden sword
and a pop-gun. During the age of adolescence this sovereign affection
shows the most sublime puerilities, the maddest hysterias, the most
fanciful vows of an infinite without limits of time or space. Side by
side with the most ideal aspirations we find, however, the impetuous and
automatic outbreaking of the first lusty actions; and a youthful
imagination, inflaming the first fevers of lust, agitates and shakes the
tender and fragile organism. Happy those who in the first storms of life
find a friendly hand as a guide and solace to preserve them from
thousands of dangers which threaten health and morality at the same
time.
The first, impatient acts of lust in adolescence are generally followed
in elect natures by a period of reaction, during which heroic vows of
chastity are made together with extraordinary endeavors to learn to hate
woman. Just at that time, in the diary of the boy who is about to become
a man, we may read these vows and aspirations for chastity which I
literally reproduce here for you:
" ... Tremendous dilemma of life; the cosmos less the woman--the
woman less the cosmos."
"I have been able to pass an entire day without embracing a woman
and without any fervid aspiration for her; and yet I have passed a
very happy day! Try and do without the evil-born race of Eve, for
all time."
"I took a seat near a Creole young lady and found her beautiful,
inebriating, voluptuous. I thought of a paradise of delights in
looking at her, and wavered. The most Creole embrace in the world,
however, is not worth the cosmic synthesis as I have conceived it
and as I will expose it to men."
"No pleasure is shorter than the erotic delirium; no sacrifice more
fruitful of useful consequences than the disdain for this
voluptuousness."
"Instinct, with the fury of its power, is for you the outward
manifestation of pleasure in its most attractive aspect; it is only
a faculty of yours, and tends to draw into its whirlpool all your
activity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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