Saturday Night/Prologue
SATURDAY NIGHT
It is Saturday night. Earth, sea, and sky blend in languorous harmony—light, wave, mountain top, and grove smile with the freshness of a world new-born, ignorant of sorrow and of death. Enchanted shore! Gods and heroes, nymphs and fawns should inhabit you, love and wisdom alone are worthy to contemplate your beauty. The idylls of Theocritus and the eclogues of Virgil breathe the spirit of your poesy, or if, perchance, a poet of our restless age has turned to you to glorify his melancholy, it was the divine Shelley, worshipper of the eternal harmony of Beauty, Truth, and Good, who refused to set bounds and limits to the infinite, adoring God in all his works. The ritual of his worship was the passionate litany of the holy poet of Assisi, the universal lover, who greeted all things with his song of ardent flame: Brother Sun, Brother Sea, Brother Birds, Brother Wolf—all brothers!
Into this enchanted scene, by Nature so lavishly endowed, comes man. It is the fashionable winter season—à la mode—man has chosen his earthly paradise well; for paradise indeed it is. He flees from the cold and the chill of the North, and he brings the chill of his life with him; he flees from his life, but his life follows and overtakes him. Every pathway opens beneath his feet into an inferno like Dante's, above whose portals is inscribed the legend:
Through me the way is to eternal dole,
Through me the way among the people lost."