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Updated: May 2, 2025
The selfish languor and indifference of to-day's possession is the consequence of the selfish ardor of yesterday's pursuit: the scorn and weariness which cries vanitas vanitatum is but the lassitude of the sick appetite palled with pleasure: the insolence of the successful parvenu is only the necessary continuance of the career of the needy struggler: our mental changes are like our gray hairs or our wrinkles but the fulfillment of the plan of mortal growth and decay: that which is snow-white now was glossy black once; that which is sluggish obesity to-day was boisterous rosy health a few years back; that calm weariness, benevolent, resigned, and disappointed, was ambition, fierce and violent, but a few years since, and has only settled into submissive repose after many a battle and defeat.
Don't you know that it has been an expensive work to persuade the Khonds of Goomsoor to give up roasting each other in the name of Heaven? Very fine is Epictetus, but wilt he be your bail? Will Diogenes bring home legs of mutton? Can you breakfast upon the simple fact that riches have wings and use them? Can you lunch upon vanitas vanitatum? Are loaves and fishes intrinsically wicked?
When that event occurs, I shall be, in effect, homeless a boarder around upon my rebukeful relatives, who 'always thought how my trifling would end, and who will be forever scribbling 'vanitas vanitatum, upon the tombstone of my departed youth my day of beaux and offers. You may shake your head and look heroic with all your might!
Their mute lips open other eloquent mouths to speak for them. Hawthorne and Byron tell us what the Faun's soul, what the Gladiator's soul, look from the white marbles to us, and the world daily repeats the story the Antinous whispers in his bent, beautiful head, the vanitas vanitatum that our own hearts whisper, when we drop earnest life for voluptuous pleasures.
This Lucullus of the Milauds, when he died, left his son the fief, stripped indeed of its fines and dues, but graced with weathercocks bearing his coat-of-arms, a thousand louis-d'or in 1802 a considerable sum of money and certain receipts for claims on very distinguished emigres enclosed in a pocketbook full of verses, with this inscription on the wrapper, Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
Thackeray needed no railway accident to remind him of "The End," and two lines before the close of "Vanity Fair" we find him writing in the prime of his life, "Ah, vanitas vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire, or, having it, is satisfied?"
Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets, under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer.
Men of harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of the Æneid.
Vanitas vanitatum! omnia vanitas! And yet he, at whose frown half the world trembles, has trembled himself at mine. I was the tutor of Arcadius. 'The Emperor of Byzantium? 'Even so, my son, even so. There I saw the world which thou wouldst see. And what saw I? Even what thou wilt see. Eunuchs the tyrants of their own sovereigns. Bishops kissing the feet of parricides and harlots.
This Lucullus of the Milauds, when he died, left his son the fief, stripped indeed of its fines and dues, but graced with weathercocks bearing his coat-of-arms, a thousand louis-d'or in 1802 a considerable sum of money and certain receipts for claims on very distinguished emigres enclosed in a pocketbook full of verses, with this inscription on the wrapper, Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
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