Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers
1881
Stevenson's essays meditates on the small terrors and great consolations of modern life. Written in 1881, these pieces find a Victorian gentleman grappling with anxieties that feel startlingly contemporary: the fear of marriage, the fragility of friendships, the way we populate our lives with trivial concerns while ignoring the earthquake waiting beneath. Stevenson's voice is distinctive - self-deprecating, musically precise, capable of pivoting from a witty observation about society matrimony to a devastating metaphor about death in a single paragraph. The title, taken from Horace, promises innocence but delivers something richer: a mature reckoning with how we live, love, and avoid thinking too hard about our own mortality. These are essays to read slowly, alone, with the sense that a clever friend is thinking aloud beside you.
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“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“As a monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map or through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the real knot of our identity - that central metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware - or the diligent service of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the whole?””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Evitar poner a prueba nuestras virtudes es una falta peor que emprender resueltamente nuestra camino y fracasar. Es legítimo rogar a Dios para que no nos deje caer en la tentación, pero no es legítimo evitar aquellas que vienen a nosotros.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go!””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“We had each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to its own shade.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
