All About Literature: The Book For Understanding Literature

My spirit, I want to speak to you; and be wise. Have you honored the Muses enough? No, not what I believe. But rather, in the fire of youth, and giving yourself up to this ease that is yours, you have sounded these abstract keys of knowledge, which indeed open all doors. So you chose to philosophize when it was time to sing. Your punishment was to come to begin at the end of the ends, which is the reasonable policy; and, if I am not mistaken, resignation came to you before ambition. Hence this contempt for poets. The pedants, who see daylight in men as under trees, knew how to spur you on with the name of poet; injustice, but deserved. I see twenty lost years here, to say the least. For to understand Plato is not much; you have to be Plato yourself and think with difficulty. The net catches only fish; and what is a fish out of the sea? What is the Plato of the Laws if one has not read the Phaedrus enough to distinguish, as if in two colors, the two mixed versions of this marvelous writing? But that didn't happen to you, although you weren't that far off, I admit that. No more, although having met the master of masters, you did not know how to throw yourself into the Timaeus as into a world of the two mixed versions of this marvelous writing? But that didn't happen to you, although you weren't that far off, I admit that. Nor, although having met the master of masters, you did not know how to throw yourself into the Timaeus as into a world of the two mixed versions of this marvelous writing? But that didn't happen to you, although you weren't that far off, I admit that. No more, although having met the master of masters, you did not know how to throw yourself into the Timaeus as into a world of top of the sky. Not then the return of Odysseus; but rather travel after having made a fortune. Doing after despising, like war and love, was kind of seeing the back of everything and the rainbow after physics.