Page 54

A damaged, fragmentary satire where pleasure, guilt, money, savagery, and kneeling flash up in broken sequence.

The page reads like surviving shards from a larger denunciation of modern appetite. Even in incomplete form, its diction keeps yoking social performance to abasement, as if pleasure is inseparable from humiliation and class theater.

'Pleasure Sirs': 'The all equal guilt squinted out savage / Named modern non money mad man', or else 'Sipping near the new throne / Where the bottom lip but kneels', closing on '??'.

The page survives as fragments, hinging on an 'or' that offers two postures toward the new throne - the savage guilt 'squinted out' versus the courtier 'Sipping near'. 'Where the bottom lip but kneels' is the sharpest image: submission located in the mouth itself, the body bowing while drinking. The address 'Sirs' keeps a mock-courtly tone over a scene of appetite and abasement. The terminal '??' refuses to resolve which posture wins, leaving pleasure at the throne an open question. This reading remains provisional because the page is marked mixed quality band and the transcript is partial/OCR-uncertain, with a bracketed '??' standing in for unrecovered text.