De planctu naturae

"Peace with hatred, faith with fraud, hope joined to fear: this is love, and madness mixed with reason. A sweet shipwreck, a light burden, a welcome Charybdis, a healthy sickness, and a hunger fully fed. A hunger that satisfies, a drunken thirst, a false delight, a joyful sadness, joys full of pain. A sweet evil, a bitter sweetness, a sweetness bitter to itself, whose smell is savory, and whose taste is bland. A welcome storm, a bright night, a shadowed day, a living death, a dying life, a pleasant evil. A sin worth pardoning, a venial fault, a playful punishment, a pious crime, indeed, a gentle wickedness. An unstable game, a stable illusion, a strength that is weak, a firmness that is fickle, a firmness that moves. A foolish reason, a mad good sense, a gloomy good fortune, a tearful laughter, a sickly rest. A soothing hell, a gloomy paradise, a pleasant prison, a spring-like winter, a wintry, evil spring. A savage moth gnawing at the mind, one that the purple robe of a king can feel, yet it does not pass over the cloak of a beggar either. Does not Cupid, working, by way of opposites, so many wonders, transform every kind of man? While that madness rages, Scylla lays down her own rage, and pious Aeneas begins to turn into Nero. Paris flashes with the sword like lightning, Tydeus grows soft with love, Nestor becomes young, and Meleager grows old. Thersites begs to borrow the beauty of Paris, Davus that of Adonis, and Adonis passes wholly into Davus. Crassus, though rich, is needy; Codrus, though needy, has abundance, Bavius gives forth songs, while the muse of Maro grows dull. Ennius speaks eloquently, and Marcus falls silent; Ulysses becomes foolish, and Ajax, by his very foolishness, grows wise. He who once conquered by resolving the sophistries of the learned is conquered by this monster, though he tames all other monsters. Any woman at all will rush headlong into wickedness, and of her own accord, if this madness should infect her mind: a daughter will kill her father, a sister her brother, or a bride her husband, by treachery, forestalling the hand of fate. And so, by a wicked ascent, she cuts off, out of due order, her husband's body, when, with a stolen sword, she reaps his head. A mother herself is forced not to know the name of a mother, and, in the very act of giving birth, plots treachery, while she who bears is herself a mother. A son is astonished to find a stepmother in his own mother, and treachery in place of loyalty, deceit in place of devotion. So too, in Medea, two names fight against each other equally, while she desires, at once, to be both mother and stepmother. Byblis did not know how to be a sister, or how to keep herself a sister, when she became far too fond a friend to Caunus. So too Myrrha, all too subject to her own father, was, in her begetter, a mother; in her father, a wife. But why should I teach you more? Every lover is forced to march beneath Cupid's spear, and swears his oaths to him. He does battle in all things; scarcely does anyone escape his rule; his thunderbolt and his anger strike everything. Against him, uprightness has no power, nor good sense, nor the grace of beauty, nor a flood of riches, nor the height of noble birth. Thefts, tricks, fear, anger, madness, fraud, violent impulse, error, sadness: these hold guest-right in his kingdom. In him, reason is to lack reason, and to have no due measure is itself the measure; and faith is to have had no faith at all. Setting sweet things before us, he takes for himself bitter ones; he brings in poison, ending the best of beginnings with a bad conclusion. Enticing, he ensnares; laughing, he mocks; anointing, he stings; and, showing affection, he infects; the lover, loving, hates. Yet you yourself will be able to curb this very pain, if you flee it; no better remedy is given. If you wish to avoid Venus, avoid the places and the times, for place and time give her the fuel she feeds on. If you pursue her, she flees; by fleeing, she is put to flight; if you yield, she yields; if you flee, she flees."