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20. These things I knew not at that time, and I loved these lower
beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths; and I said to my
friends, "Do we love anything but the beautiful? What, then, is
the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that allures and
unites us to the things we love; for unless there were a grace and
beauty in them, they could by no means attract us to them?" And I
marked and perceived that in bodies themselves there was a beauty from
their forming a kind of whole, and another from mutual fitness, as one
part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and so on.
And this consideration sprang up in my mind out of the recesses of my
heart, and I wrote books (two or three, I think) "on the fair and
fit." Thou knowest, O Lord, for it has escaped me; for I have
them not, but they have strayed from me, I know not how.
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