So the thing to do is to take advantage of everything that can be offered by the present: youth, health, physical pleasures, or occasions for displaying the virtues. This is Homer’s lesson: to live wholly, but nobly, in the present. Certainly, this “ideal” born of despair will undergo changes: we shall examine the most important of them further on (see vol. 2). But consciousness of the predestined limits and the fragility of existence was never obliterated.
