De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

bathes the whole world in purple, like the rising sun. A true illumination, which disappears and must disappear, but which is as charming as a summer morning on the seashore. Oh, youth, youth!..
And I was born in Arcadia!

Carefree, I surrendered myself to the impetuous waves; they carried me far beyond the limits of the quiet channel of private life! I liked the resilient waves, the infinity; the future was depicted as some kind of hippodrome, at the end of which the hundred-mouthed Fame and the maiden of love await, a laurel wreath and a myrtle wreath; I had a presentiment of how my life would be woven as a brilliant strand into the life of humanity, I imagined myself great, valiant... my heart expanded, my head spun... Truly, youth was good! It has passed; life no longer boils like foaming wine; the elements of the soul come into equilibrium, they grow quiet; coming-of-age arrives, and may both that frantic boiling of the past and the present harbinger of harmony be blessed! Every moment of life is good, if only it is true to itself; it is bad if it appears in a guise that is not its own. I do not like modest, prim, exemplary young people: they remind me of Alexey Stepanovich Molchalin a sycophantic character from Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit"; they have not grasped life, they have not nourished their hearts with the warm blood of joyful beliefs, they have not yearned to participate in world-altering deeds. They have not lived with hopes for a great calling; they have not shed tears of sorrow at the sight of misfortune, or tears of rapture while contemplating the elegant; they have not surrendered themselves to the stormy rapture of an orgy; they did not have a need for a friend—and a maiden will not love them with a true love: their lot is to drown headlong in the crowd. Let youths be youths. Adulthood will show that Providence has not put so much into the power of each person; that humanity develops according to its own world logic, in which one cannot skip over a term for the sake of individual will; adulthood will show the necessity of private life; the bud that belonged to humanity will develop into a separate branch; but, as Zhukovsky Vasily Zhukovsky, a prominent Russian poet says about a wave:

Having poured into the sea, it will not flow back out of the sea.

The soul that has once surrendered itself to universal life, to high interests, will also be above the crowd in the practical world, even