Well, yes. And I suppose you have to enjoy languages to bother with the original texts of writers like Calderón de la Barca, but he was a poet and a philosopher, so reading is sometimes the only way to really catch and chew on what he's saying.

Still and all, he's wrong to go dismissing all our culpability for the things we do. It's all well and good to dismiss life as a dream (that's another title of his, by the way), but it won't do to say everything just illusory because then you imply that we're not, in the end, authors of our own deeds. Or that what we do hasn't any important substance. D'you see? I've been working myself into quite a state over this dusty old Spaniard, and I really should quit him, except that he's so bloody beautiful sometimes.

Éstas que fueron pompa y alegría

despertando al albor de la mañana,

a la tarde serán lástima vana

durmiendo en brazos de la noche fría.

That's from a sonnet of his that likens roses to people in their short-lived beauty. It's really poignant. Also true. To put it into English, he talks of the splendour and vigour of the flowers when, in the morning, they awake, but he points out that evening inevitably comes and with it the realisation that all vitality is vain and pathetic, a prelude to our long sleep in night's cold arms.

That's good, isn't it? Night's cold arms?

Terrible, but true.