Days of infatuation!
I never pass that way now without thanking God for a misspent youth. Why
not make a fool of yourself? It is good fun while it lasts; it yields
mellow mirth for later years, and are not our fellow-creatures, those
solemn buffoons, ten times more ridiculous? Where is the use of
experience, if it does not make you laugh? The Logic of the
Intellect - what next! If any one had treated me to such tomfoolery while
standing there, petrified into a pillar of fidelity in that creeping
shadow, I should have replied gravely:
"The Logic of the Intellect, my dear Sir, is incompatible with
situations like mine. It was not invented for so stupendous a crisis. I
am waiting for my negress - can't you understand? - and she is already
seven minutes late...."
A flaming morning, forestaste of things to come.
I find myself, after an early visit to the hospital where things are
doing well, glancing down, towards midday, into Trajan's Forum, as one
looks into some torrid bear-pit.
Broken columns glitter in the sunshine; the grass is already withered to
hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is
altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in
a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital
half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more
morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the
mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves a rendezvous on
this classic soil; cats of every colour and every age - quite young ones
among them; all, one would say, at the last gasp of life.
