CHAPTER XV LOVE AND AGE
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.
"It is only one of your faculties and that which you have in common with the lowest creatures at the bottom of the series of creation, and this faculty wants to be the first; the first and only for a few moments; but in these moments the least noble of your powers wants to, and can, take a great part of yourself, of your ego. It is a sovereign who rules only for a few seconds, but who has power enough during the period of his reign to destroy half of the state and leave his throne upon a heap of ruins, firebrands and ashes; it is easy to destroy, but from a mass of ruins and ashes to rebuild a state is a hopeless task."