No More Learning

"You use a word that until now has had no meaning for me. "

Your country?

"I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situated. "

Then Beauty?

"Her I would love willingly, goddess and immortal. "

Gold?

"I hate it as you hate your God. "

What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?

"I love the clouds--the clouds that pass--yonder--the marvellous
clouds. "




EVERY MAN HIS CHIMAERA.


Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass,
and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several
men who walked bowed down to the ground.

Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimaera as heavy as a sack of
flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.

But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and
oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with
her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head
reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by
which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.

I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so.
He replied
that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently they
went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to
walk.

Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the
ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had
said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary
faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the
heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate as
the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men condemned
to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere
of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself to the
curiosity of the human eye.

During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this
mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me, nor
was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing
Chimaeras.




VENUS AND THE FOOL.


How admirable the day! The vast park swoons beneath the burning eye of
the sun, as youth beneath the lordship of love.

There is no rumour of the universal ecstasy of all things. The waters
themselves are as though drifting into sleep. Very different from the
festivals of humanity, here is a silent revel.

It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all objects glimmer more
and more, as though the excited flowers burn with a desire to rival the
blue of the sky by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat,
making perfumes visible, drives them in vapour towards their star.

Yet, in the midst of this universal joy, I have perceived one afflicted
thing.

At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those motley fools, those
willing clowns whose business it is to bring laughter upon kings when
weariness or remorse possesses them, lies wrapped in his gaudy and
ridiculous garments, coined with his cap and bells, huddled against the
pedestal, and raises towards the goddess his eyes filled with tears.

And his eyes say: "I am the last and most alone of all mortals, inferior
to the meanest of animals in that I am denied either love or friendship.