Verse 19

¹³Once, his judgement spoiled by the company of the bad, he goes over to false doctrine, which gives pain either way, as a man stumbles into a stream that has no water in it. ¹⁴But when he is blinded by the harm others do him and nothing comes to him for himself, then he eats up the fathers and the sons of a man who has fathers and sons, or else his own fathers and sons. ¹⁵Sometimes he comes home to a house like a forest fire, stripped of what he loved and of the means to live, with no happiness to follow, and burning in the fire of grief he is brought to a hard weariness of it all. ¹⁶Sometimes the raksasa of the king's court, made cruel by the times, carries off his dearest, his money and his breath, and he sits like a body already dead, the marks of life gone out of him.

¹⁷Sometimes fathers and grandfathers come to him in his wishing, the unreal taken for the real, and he feels a contentment with the mark of a dream on it. ¹⁸Sometimes, setting himself to climb the mountain that is the overload of works the householder's stage demands, his mind worn thin by the troubles of the world, he sinks as though walking into a field of thorns and grit. ¹⁹And sometimes the unbearable fire inside his body takes his strength away, and he is angry at his own household.