nature, as he called his infatuation. I thanked him
for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty
worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a
dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me Philistine and went his
way.

ANA. It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her
defects.

DON JUAN. She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me.
Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what
an astounding illumination! I had been prepared for infatuation, for
intoxication, for all the illusions of love's young dream; and lo! never
was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless. The most
jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly
than I. I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.

ANA. But you did take her.

DON JUAN. That was the revelation. Up to that moment I had never lost
the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step
until my reason had examined and approved it. I had come to believe that
I was a purely rational creature: a thinker! I said, with the foolish
philosopher, "I think; therefore I am." It was Woman who taught me to
say "I am; therefore I think." And also "I would think more; therefore I
must be more."

THE STATUE. This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you
would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form
of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your
conversation would be easier to follow.

DON JUAN. Bah! what need I add? Do you not understand that when I stood
face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned
me to spare her and save myself. My morals said No. My conscience said
No. My chivalry and pity for her said No. My prudent regard for myself
said No. My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye,
exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her
color to shreds. I caught all those tell-tale resemblances to her father
and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time.
I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I
made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the
nerves. The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the
plains of heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory,
deserted me in that supreme hour. I remembered them and desperatel