Euterpe.
You make me eager for an illness. What shall it be? Prescribe one for me. I am ignorant even of the names of the principal maladies. Let it be a not unbecoming one.
Æsculapius.
Ah! no, Euterpe. Your mind still runs
in the channel of your lost impermeability. Till now, you might fling yourself from the crags of Tartarus, or float, like a trail of water-plants, on the long, blown flood of the altar-flame, and yet take no hurt, being imperishable. But now, part of your hourly occupation, part of your faith, your hope, your duty, must be to preserve your body against the inroads of decay.
Euterpe.
You present us with a tedious conception of our new existence, surely.
Æsculapius.
Why should it be tedious? There was tedium, rather, in the possession of bodies as durable as metal, as renewable as wax, as insensitive as water. In the fiercest onset of the passions, prolonged to satiety, there was always an element of
the unreal. What is pleasure, if the strain of it is followed by no fatigue; what the delicacy of taste, if we can eat like caverns and drink like conduits without being vexed by the slightest inconvenience? You will discover that one of the acutest enjoyments of the mortal state will be found to consist in guarding against suffering. If you are provided with balloons attached to all your members, you float upon the sea with indifference. It is the certainty that you will drown if you do not swim which gives zest to the exercise. I climb along yonder jutting cornice of the cliff with eagerness, and pluck my simples with a hand that trembles more from joy than fear, precisely because the strain of balancing the nerves, and the certainty of suffering as the result of carelessness, knit my sensations together into an exaltation which is not exactly pleasure, perhaps, but which is not to be distinguished