Vanishing Youth

Petrarch is known as the father of Humanism and ushered in the era of the Italian Renaissance. This passage is from Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity. It kinda hit home:

My youth was gone before I realized it; I was carried away by the strength of manhood; but a riper age brought me to my senses and taught me by experience the truth I had long before read in books, that youth and pleasure are vanity-nay, that the Author of all ages and times permits us miserable mortals, puffed up with emptiness, thus to wander about, until finally, coming to a tardy consciousness of our sins, we shall learn to know ourselves.

Personally, I would replace the word sin with ignorance.

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