Beatrice existed infinitely for Dante. Dante very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. All of us tend to forget, out of pity, out of veneration, this grievous discord which for Dante was unforgettable. Reading and rereading the vicissitudes of his illusory meeting, I think of the two lovers that Alighieri dreamed in the hurricane of the second circle and who, whether or not he understood or wanted them to be, were obscure emblems of the joy he did not attain. I think of Paolo and Francesca, forever united in their Inferno: “questi, che mai da me non fia diviso” [this one, who never shall be parted from me]. With appalling love, with anxiety, with admiration, with envy.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Meeting in a Dream.” 1948. Translated by Esther Allen.
“What about it?” he said. “Something broke inside you just now, didn’t it? I can’t bear to see a friend of mine living with something inside him so easy to break. My entire kindness lies in destroying such things.”
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, t. Ivan Morris. 1956.
It was the first time, I recall, that I fantasized about it, but I couldn’t stand it for long, I looked into a dark well with a few glimmers of light and drew back. Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein. 2015.
neetgrl:
rena
What were you after? Last night you almost reached your goal. What was it you discovered in yourself that was so ready to burst from its cocoon? At daybreak your comrades were full of complaint: tell me, of what had they been defrauded? What had they discovered in themselves that was about to show itself, and that now they wept for?
What, Sergeant, were the visions that governed your destiny and justified your risking your life in this adventure? Your life, your only treasure! We have to live a long time before we become men. Very slowly do we plait the braid of friendships and affections. We learn slowly. We compose our creation slowly. And if we die too early we are in a sense cheated out of our share. We have to live a long time to fulfil ourselves.
But you, by the grace of an ordeal in the night which stripped you of all that was not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious creature born of yourself. Great was this creature, and never shall you forget him. And he is yourself. You have had the sudden sense of fulfilling yourself at the instant of discovery, and you have learned suddenly that the future is now less necessary for the accumulation of treasures. That creature within you who opened his wings is not bound by ties to perishable things; he agrees to die for all men, to be swallowed up in something universal.
A great wind swept through you and delivered from the matrix the sleeping prince you sheltered—Man within you. You are the equal of the musician composing his music, of the physicist extending the frontier of knowledge, of all those who build the highways over which we march to deliverance. Now you are free to gamble with death. What have you now to lose?
Let us say you were happy in Barcelona: nothing more can ruin that happiness. You have reached the altitude where all loves are of the same stuff. Perhaps you suffered on earth, felt yourself alone on the planet, knew no refuge to which you might fly? What of that! Sergeant, this day you have been welcomed home by love.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes), translated by Lewis Galantiére. 1939.
Here I touch the inescapable contradiction I shall never be able to resolve. For man’s greatness does not reside merely in the destiny of the species: each individual is an empire. When a mine caves in and closes over the head of a single miner, the life of the community is suspended.
His comrades, their women, their children, gather in anguish at the entrance to the mine, while below them the rescue party scratch with their picks at the bowels of the earth. What are they after? Are they consciously saving one unit of society? Are they freeing a human being as one might free a horse, after computing the work he is still capable of doing? Ten other miners may be killed in the attempted rescue: what inept cost accounting! Of course it is not a matter of saving one ant out of the colony of ants! They are rescuing a consciousness, an empire whose significance is incommensurable with anything else.
Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on feast days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love, inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates. It stirs us, prolongs itself in us. Man’s gestures are an eternal spring. Though we die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft. Solitary he may be; universal he surely is.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes), translated by Lewis Galantiére. 1939.
You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell for ever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be, and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind. You came towards me in an aureole of charity and magnanimity bearing the gift of water. All my friends and all my enemies marched towards me in your person. It did not seem to me like you were rescuing me, rather did it seem that you were forgiving me. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes), translated by Lewis Galantiére. 1939.
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one’s comrades. It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes), translated by Lewis Galantiére. 1939.
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
Henri Guillaumet, as quoted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes), translated by Lewis Galantiére. 1939.
And when I heard of this meagre destiny, I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone?”
That man was leaving behind him a fallow field, a fallow planet. He was bound by ties of love to all cultivatable land and to all the trees of the earth. There was a generous man, a prodigal man, a nobleman! There was a man who, battling against death in the name of his Creation, could like Guillaumet be called a man of courage!
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes), translated by Lewis Galantiére. 1939.
