What followed? No degree in love's
progress was left untried by our passion, and if love itself could
imagine any wonder as yet unknown, we discovered it. And our
inexperience of such delights made us all the more ardent in our
pursuit of them, so that our thirst for one another was still
unquenched.
In measure as this passionate rapture absorbed me more and more, I
devoted ever less time to philosophy and to the work of the school.
Indeed it became loathsome to me to go to the school or to linger
there; the labour, moreover, was very burdensome, since my nights
were vigils of love and my days of study. My lecturing became
utterly careless and lukewarm; I did nothing because of
inspiration, but everything merely as a matter of habit. I had
become nothing more than a reciter of my former discoveries, and
though I still wrote poems, they dealt with love, not with the
secrets of philosophy. Of these songs you yourself well know how
some have become widely known and have been sung in many lands,
chiefly, methinks, by those who delighted in the things of this
world. As for the sorrow, the groans, the lamentations of my
students when they perceived the preoccupation, nay, rather the
chaos, of my mind, it is hard even to imagine them.
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