Notes on L'Enfant de Volupté by Gabriele D'Annunzio.
P 58. Between the obelisk of the Trinity and the column of the Conception, I suspended in ex-voto my catholic and pagan heart.
She laughs at his sentence. He had a madrigal on his lips about his suspended heart; but he did not utter it, for he disliked prolonging the dialogue in this false and light tone and thus spoiling his intimate enjoyment. He was silent.
P 63. The real reader is certainly not the one who buys me, but the one who loves me. The real reader is therefore the lady who shows herself ready to love me. The laurel serves no other purpose than to attract the myrtle.
"But glory?"
— True glory is posthumous: it cannot therefore be enjoyed.
P 68. As constrained by the impetuous desire of the young man, Elena turned a little; and she smiled at him with a smile so delicate, so immaterial, 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, always sad, remained as if lost in the distance of an inner dream.
P 139. Convalescence is purification and 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 confidence than after having fathomed the depths of death. By healing, man understands that the thought, the desire, the will, the consciousness of life is not life.
P 149. “The tree of knowledge has been stripped, all is known” sings Byron in Don Juan. In truth, salvation would reside for him, in the future, in “ευλάβεια”, that is to say in prudence, in subtleties, in circumspection, in sagacity. What he meant by that seemed to him to find its perfect expression in the sonnet of a contemporary poet, whom he preferred for a certain affinity of literary tastes and a common aesthetic education.
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