Notes on Gabriele D'Annunzio's The Child of Pleasure.
P 58. Between the Trinity obelisk and the Conception column, I hung my Catholic and pagan heart votive offering
She laughed at his remark. He had a madrigal on his lips about his suspended heart; but he didn't utter it, for he disliked prolonging the dialogue in this false and frivolous tone and thus spoiling his private enjoyment. He fell silent.
P 63. The true reader is certainly not the one who buys me, but the one who loves me. The true reader, therefore, is the lady who shows herself ready to love me. The laurel serves no other purpose than to attract the myrtle.
— But what about glory?
— True glory is posthumous: consequently, it cannot be enjoyed.
P 68. As if compelled by the young man's impetuous desire, Elena turned slightly; and she smiled at him with such a subtle, immaterial smile that it seemed to result not from a movement of the lips, but from an irradiation of the soul on the lips, while the eyes, still sad, remained as if lost in the distance of an inner dream.
P 139. Convalescence is a purification and a rebirth. The feeling of life is never so sweet as after the anguish of illness; and never is the human soul more inclined to kindness and trust than after having plumbed the depths of death. In healing, man understands that thought, desire, will, and the awareness of life are not life itself.
P 149. “The tree of knowledge has been stripped bare, all is known,” sings Byron in Don Juan. In truth, salvation for him would lie, in the future, in “ευλάβεια,” that is to say, in prudence, in subtlety, in circumspection, in sagacity. What he meant by this seemed to find its perfect expression in the sonnet of a contemporary poet, whom he preferred for a certain affinity of literary tastes and a shared aesthetic education.
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