Planus Read Online Free PDF

is paradise lost, a paradise of innocent loves! A few steps farther on, at a turning of the road, I was to learn this bitter lesson,.
    I was carrying my Isfahan cane, as you see everyone in Persia carrying one: the mule-driver has his stick, the merchant his cane with gold bands or inlay of silver or mother of pearl, the magistrate or official his rod of ebony or redwood crowned at each end with a knob of ivory, or an amber or cornelian ball; the young people, like myself, carry a wand of wild rosewood in their hands, which is not an accessory of masculine vanity or elegance but a symbol of virility (in Brazil, the Negroes, who were formerly slaves, carry a rolled umbrella on their shoulders, much as the old Roman lictor bore his fasces as a symbol of the authority of the Law!), and this is carried solemnly in front of them, at eye-level, like a bishop's cross, not to say a field-marshal's baton or a sceptre, and is not to be trailed in the dust and mud, nor tapped on the macadam in the frivolous manner of a Frenchman, who sacrilegiously gesticulates with a cane as if it were a walking-stick, or an Englishman who beats time, tries to cover up his nervousness and his awkward gait, and punctuate the instability of his moods, his intimate cares, his repressed desires, yet never succeeds in regulating his headlong career. In Persia, a man has his self-respect, he is calm and dignified, he walks with compunction, each imagining himself to be someone of note. And I began to laugh, not because I had escaped my pursuers nor because I was the happy possessor of such a precious cane and its secret treasure of three marvellous pearls, but because I was aping my noble father so well. I walked on, holding my Isfahan cane in front of me, and I laughed, and I cursed my father for having been the first to think of transforming these agrarian slopes, open to the sky, with one of the loveliest and most human aspects in the world, a site celebrated since the days of antiquity, into a wretched, modern housing estate, hemmed in, behind barbed wire, encircled by high walls, delimited, parcelled up, turned into a prison, and the farther I went — I was descending that sunken path that tumbles down from the heights of the Vomero to Posilippo, following the traces of the old mule-track, and which was but yesterday a place of reverie, where lovers, so the great poets tell us, wandered and thought the world well lost, and which was now, fifteen years after my father had this absurd idea of building a housing estate in such a place of silence and meditation, all rutted by the incessant traffic of the contractors who brought up building materials and took down their rubbish (in places, it still smelled of basil, pine resin, rosemary and the rich odour of trampled dung, and not exclusively of petrol and fuel oil, for it was not yet the epoch of intensive mechanization and row upon row of ferro-concrete buildings, which was soon to follow, in the name of progress!) — and the farther I descended the steep slope, the more the number of gates multiplied, and the walls rose up surrounding smaller and yet smaller gardens, trim, well-raked, full of ornamental potted plants, exotic arborescent shrubs, a pond, an idiotic jet of water, goldfish, rustic charm de luxe, a thatched English cottage, a Bavarian villa, a portable American bungalow (already the urbanists were making their shoddy imitations!), the whole thing without rhyme or reason, and the closer I approached to Posilippo, the more I became aware that such a negligible personage as myself, a tattered fugitive, a vagabond, would never succeed in making his way in there and finding solitude, not even a corner to lie down and rest in, and the farther I went the more I laughed at myself and the more I cursed my father, for I saw myself advancing in reverse, as if in a mirror.
    Now, the man who curses his father is a devil.
    St Cassien's condemnation is categorical. It is also the opinion of the desert