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Ascolo Parodites
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To be always in a state of optimism, or even to abide by that noble thought, sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae, can never be the lavish background required of compassion, much less self-compassion. Compassion is peculiar to one who is conscious, not of simply having experienced a misfortune similar to some other person; for compassion does not even require empathy, but for a moment having fallen from grace. Thus do I ask myself: do I still have eyes even to see? Yea, I am Oxylus; this is my mule. Look at his two eyes, they are named pity and longing, and my single eye is named hope. Here I stand amidst the frozen vegetation and the bleak air, of the north, who is named hopeless; whose air licks at the ears of my mule: from all sides it is howling, threatening, shrieking at me. Suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before me a great northern bear, walking cautiously in the silence. What? Has all the halycon and contemplation of the world commenced here? Is my self-pity itself sitting in this quiet place- my self, completely released to the spirit of this north; my injured and shamed self, my second, therein immortalized self? Not yet to have died, but also to have never truly lived? As a testing, spiritlike, and intermediate being? As though I were that bear that moves over the pale north with its white coat, like an enormous moth into the sun! But what is the sun for it, when there is no such thing as 'warmth?' Why do these northern airs, these dead winds also bring on a poetical mood and the inventive pleasure of verses? In this cruel solitude, in this northern land, I have learned that all beautiful women, all noble bodies, if they are beautiful beyond words, make us place delight in taciturnity and reservation: for all our words to them betray our shortcomings, our wounds, our shame. The woman confuses her sense of pity and solicitude, and calls this love; for though a man may bring her to tears with his confessions and emendicating for forgiveness, the law of her love is yet ardeat ipsa licet, tormentis gaudet amantis. To illicit genuine commiseration in a woman, this is an impossibility provided she has fallen in love with you. When a man loves, he must betray himself of his shortcomings, all his shame and weaknesses; that is to say, he must conquer in himself guilt, by taking a woman worthy of it. Thus a man's love, that is the profoundest humanity, because it testifies to and preserves the law of the sexes: all propriety, with respect to the manner of the sexes, is surely born out of this. Conversely, all impropriety and solecism is born from the woman's love. With it, enters flamboyance into man, the gloating and parading of women, contestation of power, propensity towards extravagant spending, the ostentation of wealth and estate, etc. All of these defects are absent in the man that has had little experience with the love of women: this is not a coincidence. Just as much as all of these defects in man, which have been mentioned, are analogous to the intrinsic qualities of the woman, her love may be accredited with the general degradation of the sexes. Pity is her pax Cererem nutrim, solicitude her pacis alumna Ceres. Ah, but this is a man's greatest snare and Trojan stupidity. What is the secret of thy happiness then, woman? I find it expressed in the contention of Blesensis, facilius sustineantur; sic cor humanum necesse est igne charitatis accendi, ad hoc ut de facili sustineat tribulationes, that the disposition to doing good blosters a good disposition. Yet, when a man stands in the midst of his own beauty, in the midst of his own northern airs of taciturnity and reservation, he is likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for- his mistakes, his wounds, his shortcomings. That is self-compassion. After all, to be more than you have become- is that anything more than a broken, a choked and suffocated heart, suffocated by this cruel wind? To be the cito maturum of thy own cito putridum? Not to experience this yearning? Yet, even with this yearning, man almost believes that his greater self lives there amongst the shortcomings, the humiliations, the injuries: in these quiet regions even the fiercest air, even the howling air, turns into deathly silence, and in the most remote northern regions, where you will find the white bear, youth itself even turns into a dream of youth. Yet even for the most beautiful and gliding bear, there is so much howling and screaming of the wind, and unfortunately so disinterested, bored wind! The magic and the most powerful self-compassion, the most gracious effect of our shortcomings is, so to speak, reccedant vetera: but that first requires age! And age will forgive us even of our haec olim meminisse juvabit in our shortcomings, mistakes, wounds: Cui respondit intuens rotae, volubilitatem in qua mox summa max ima funt, cogito de nostra fortuna. Infini enim animi est, hominis parum sibi constantis, qui perpetuum vitae tenorem somniet.. [Edinus Cyriacus in Momos et artium liberalium mastygas] Yet a longing for seduction abideth in me now, which speaketh in all the measure and cadences of seduction. Darkness am I: how I long for a luminary, that it might pierce into my effluence, even that I would dance unto seduction like the stream before the moon, whose timidity danceth unto seduction, and steppeth on the toes of temptation! Alas, why am I not full of light and like unto the sun? How joyfully would I then eat of the fruits of the dying year, and how babishly would I sup of the milk of this night, oh! how would I find ardor in silence like unto a nursling at breast! And even you would I bless, ye billowy clouds, who steal away the moon from me and become argent thereunto! Oh, how ye do remind me of myself: I am argent, and even I have put out the light of my own luminary; for aurum, that is too clumsy a temptation wherewith my timidity to dance unto! And certainly, even I live unto my own night, and unto my own mirages in my night: I approach them, and lo! Ever back unto myself my timidity do I disprove. I know not the happiness of vulnerability, and therefor not that of the hand stretched forth with golden apples; and oft have I dreamt that seducing must be more blessed than tempting. Oh Juvenal, how wrong you are: tanti tibi non sunt opaci omnis arent Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum ut somno careas.
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