these elements lacking, and the life is wanting, defective, impure.
“I have no faith in men who were conceived in a perfunctory manner, on a pragmatical system, so to speak; the wife receiving her husband in bed as she would a tedious guest at an afternoon tea.
Only two flames uniting produce a third; but a flame and a name, or a flame and a sponge, produce a hiff and nothing.
Oh, that the children of the race are all born phoenix-like in the fire of noble and sacred passion, in the purgatory, as it were, of Love. What a race, what a race we should have. What men, what women!
Yes, that is how the children of the earth should be conceived, not on a pragmatical system, in an I-don’t-care-about-the-issue manner.
I believe in evoking the spirit, in dreaming a little about the gods of Olympus, and a little, too, about the gods of the abysmal depths, before the bodily communion. And in earnest, O my Brother, let us do this, despite what old Socrates says about the propriety and wisdom of approaching your wife with prudence and gravity. …”
And thus, if we did not often halloo, Khalid, like a huntsman pursuing his game, would lose himself in the pathless, lugubrious damp of the forest.
If we did not prevent him at times, holding firmly to his coattail, he would desperately pursue the ghost of his thoughts even on such precipitous paths to those very depths in which Socrates and Montaigne always felt at home.
But he, a feverish, clamorous, obstreperous stripling of a Bedouin, what chance has he in extricating his barbaric instincts from such thorny hedges of philosophy? And had he not quoted Socrates in that last paragraph, it would have been expunged.