La Cartuja de Parma Book

In 1975, I lugged this paperback along with my brown bag lunch on my trips into the dreary downtown enclave that first fitfully entombed my youthful dreams - my dark office at the outset of my thirty-year fully-pensionable life sentence.

As my enthusiasm waned there, though eschewing the ribald loves of my fellow lifers' way of all flesh, I found a fond friend in Fabrizio - O yes, Stendhal's ever-young protagonist, Fabrizio!

You see, his wayward mom and sparkling little aunt had given this kid a very long leash indeed.

Careful, ladies... His erratically errant psychological type is the kind of persona you have to watch - closely. As folks had to watch BOTH of us back then.

For Quixotic at heart, Fabrizio and I had vowed never to rescind our Law of the Quest.

You see, we were born - and remained - rather dense naïfs, Fabrizio and I.

And if you're like that, and just let the good times roll, you're only headed for one of of life's many brick walls.

It's just plain fact.

So here is Fabrizio, chafing at the bit for his first Quest, like Lord Byron's Childe Harold, taking off for whatever Lady Luck might throw his way, leaving his childhood château to go onward and outward into the grim facts of life, in a Napoleonic Era paysage moralisé.

Perhaps it will do him some good...

And so, when his wonderful questing is rewarded with the Gorgon's head of a thankless coming of age - finally! - reading that, I consoled myself with the empathetic thought that, like him, perhaps my best bet, and my ticket out of this darkly hellish lifelong sentence In an awful office, would be in the cloistered life of peaceful recollection he finally opts for.

And that's to a certain extent what I've been given, now that my pension has locked in. A life of peaceful reflection - books and meditations on books. All I ever wanted. And now - after my life's disastrous obstacle course - how sweet it all is.

Now, what I've said here is only the barest of outlines of Stendhal's whopping good yarn.

In effect, though, he is preaching his rather coarse "make hay while the sun shines" to the youth of the Machine Age, who may, like Fabrizio and me, have had their noses otherwise perpetually stuck in a dumb Book of Chivalry.

But you know, kind author, for all your robust seat-of-your-pants fictional action - and ever-apparent arch irony - you should know better than to have advised us, the Fabrizio's of the free world, to "carpe diem."

For in your own life as a career diplomat, black tedium dogged your steps to the end -

But, believing in the Code of a Lifelong Quest, and avoiding your private and perilous affairs of the heart, has brought me and Fabrizio, finally, to the Peace of its Fulfillment.