“Economics! How could one be expected to moil over such dulness when the perfume and the moon and all the demoralizing lure of a May evening were seething in one’s brain? A rebellion against the prosaic mold into which all five of us were being poured, rose up inside me. I flung my book away and rushed out of the apartment on to the throbbing shadowy campus. The lake in the valley, I knew, would be glittering, and I turned toward it, surging within at the sense of temporary escape from confinement. Cool and clean, the wind, frolicking down the aisle of trees, tousled my hair, and set my blood to dancing. Never had I known a night so overflowing with beauty and with poetry. The thought of my roommates back in that penitentiary room made shout with impatience.

         All the afternoon of that day I had spent in the woods beside Stony Brook, lost in a volume of Dorian Gray. And now as I tramped downhill to the lake, I began to recite aloud to the trees and the stars, lines from it that had burned themselves into my memory “Realize your youth while you have it”… the sound of my own voice startled me, but the woods echoed back the phrase approvingly, so I took courage. “Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, or giving your life away to the ignorant and the common. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals of our age.” … “Sickly aims, sickly aims,” the crickets chirruped after me. “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you. Be afraid of nothing. There is such a little time that your youth will last – such a little time. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty” – I was already a year past twenty – “becomes sluggish. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”

         A wave of exultation swept over me. Youth – nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability – I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

         The romantic – that was what I wanted. I hungered for the romance of the sea, and foreign ports, and foreign smiles. I wanted to follow the prow of a ship, any ship, and sail away, perhaps to China, perhaps to Spain, perhaps to the South Sea Ilse, there to do nothing all day long but lie on a surf-swept beach and fling monkeys at the coconuts.

         I hungered for the romance of great mountains. From childhood I had dreamed of climbing Fujiyama and the Matterhorn, and had planned to charge Mount Olympus in order to visit the gods that dwelt there. I wanted to swim the Hellespont where Lord Byron swam, float down the Nile in a butterfly boat, make love to a pale Kashmiri maiden behind the Shalimar, dance to the castanets of Granada gipsies, commune in solitude with the moonlit Taj Mahal, hunt tigers in a Bengal jungle – try everything once. I wanted to realize my youth while I had it, and yield to temptation before increasing years and responsibilities robbed me of the courage.”

        — Richard Halliburton “The Royal Road to Romance”