The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: their own lofty thoughts of the future for the small change of
our life-annuity ideas. He, even as they, had he chosen, might
well have walked with his feet on the earth and his head in the
skies; but he liked better to sit on earth, to wither the soft,
fresh, fragrant lips of a woman with kisses, for like Death, he
devoured everything without scruple as he passed; he would have
full fruition; he was an Oriental lover, seeking prolonged
pleasures easily obtained. He sought nothing but a woman in
women, and cultivated cynicism, until it became with him a habit
of mind. When his mistress, from the couch on which she lay,
soared and was lost in regions of ecstatic bliss, Don Juan
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