O. is Homeric in the simplicity of his tastes. A house is a place
in which to sleep, clothes are to keep one warm, food is to eat
and the manner of its service is an indifferent matter. He enjoys
with almost huge pleasure good things to eat and good things to
drink, but as he puts it, "I am as much at home with corned beef
and cabbage as I am with any epicurean chef d'oeuvre. I like the
feel of silk next my body, but cotton pleases me as much." He is
clean and bathes regularly, but has no repulsion against dirt and
disorder. At home, among the utmost refinements of our
present-day life, he prefers the rough bare essentials of
existence. To him beauty is not exotic, but everywhere present,
and he sees it in a workman clad in overalls and breaking stone
quite as much as in a carefully harmonized landscape. He has no
pose about the beauty of nature as against the beauty of man's
creations, and he thinks that a puffing freight engine, dragging
a load of cars up a grade, is as much a thing to enthuse about as
a graceful deer sniffing the scent of the hunter in some pine
grove.
Imbued with a zeal for living and a desire for experience, O. has
not been as successful as one more cautious and less impetuous
might have been. He loves his profession so well that he would
rather spend a day on an interesting case in the ward of some
hospital than to treat half a dozen rich patients in his
consulting room. His purpose is indeed unified; he seeks to learn
and to impart, but the making of money seems to him a necessary
irrelevance, almost an impertinent intrusion upon the real
purposes of life. He is eager to know people, he shows a naive
curiosity about them, an interest that flatters and charms. All
the phenomena of life--esoteric, commonplace, queer and
conventional--are grist to his mill.
His sexual life has not differed greatly from that of other men.
In his early youth his passions outran his inhibitions, and he
tasted of this type of experience with the same gusto with which
he delved into books. As he reached early manhood he fell in love
and pledged himself to chastity. Though he fell out of love soon
his pledge remained in full force, and though he cursed himself
as a fool he held himself aloof from sex adventure. When he was
twenty-seven he again fell in love, had an impetuous and charming
courtship and married. He loves his wife, and there is in their
intimacy a buoyant yet controlled passion which values love for
its own sake. He enters into his duties as father with the same
zeal and appetite that characterizes his every activity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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