Late hours lure. The cup of foaming pleasure is mixed with tears of pain. Excitement and absence of restraint drain vitality so that carousers are unfit for life’s practical duties of business, home, society and religion. Midnight dissipation breaks down the reserve of virtue and becomes a vestibule to vice through which throng fevered bodies, stifled wits and sodden souls. Surely they show, as the mask is removed, faces that are anything but gay. Sin has pleasures, but they are only “for a season.” Soon the lights fade, the sweet turns bitter, apples of Sodom turn to dust and ashes, and we have nothing but grief and pain for promised joy.
Women rule. Cherubim of hell, they sit around in scanty costumes that show what they are supposed to hide, and eat and drink, talk and look and leer with a flushed and overwrought animation of mind and body. De Musset’s confession is ours, and first astonishment gives way to horror and pity. The masked ball is but the scum of libertinism; the feast is ennui trying to live; the palace of sin is filled with yawning mouths, fixed eyes and hooked hands.
If we believe with the Mohammedan that heaven here and hereafter is pleasure, and so smile at debauchery and defy death, we will live to shed tears hotter than blood, dream dreams that reflect the flames of a literal hell, and have a moral nature as hideous and deformed as our bodies, so twisted with disease that the undertaker must change the shape of the coffin to fit the limbs.
The Seven Ages of Man
From “As You Like It”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women in it are merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,