Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.
There is a special category of greatness for lines quoted by masters as epigraphs -- the way Poe used Sir Thomas Browne in "The Murders in the Re Morgue" or Eliot's borrowing from a major speech in Measure for Measure.
The lines quoted above are by Fulke Greville, the Elizabethan poet, author of Mustapha and Caelica, and my candidate for the most underrated poet in English literature.
Aldous Huxley quoted a variant of these lines from "Chorus Sacerdotum" as the epigraph for Point Counter Point:
Oh, wearisome conditions of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws ---
Passion and reason, self-division's cause?.
`Leave aside critical questions of punctuation and capitalization, and the most significant change is the transformation of the last word in the passage, "cause," from verb to noun.
Point Counter Point is a substantial novel of ideas and talk about ideas, with a character based on DH Lawrence among other recognizable literati, though it is possible to regard the epigraph as the single best thing about it just as a Sinatra song over the closing credits ("It's Nice to Go Traveling," for example) may upstage the terrorist skyjacking thriller that ends with it.
-- DL
