Section 36 of Jami's Baharestan is a comic yet moralizing anecdote about an aged man who, having spent his vigor in a youth of pleasure-seeking, purchases a beautiful slave girl only to find that his body can no longer answer his desire. When he begs the girl to revive his failed manhood through massage, every effort proves useless, and she privately recites verses likening his spent instrument to a limp, lifeless thing that cannot reach its mark (the thread that will not pass through the eye of the needle). The tale dramatizes the mismatch between persistent carnal appetite (shahwat) and the exhausted physical capacity of old age. Like the parallel warnings elsewhere in Persian didactic literature about greed and pride clinging on after youth has passed, it presents the old man's grasping at youthful passion as folly, implicitly urging the aged to accept their decline rather than chase what the body can no longer sustain.