TWC Weekly

[Siblesz]

As I sat under a tree, pensively going over the hundreds of articles and excerpts that I have read, an idea struck me as I thought to myself how I could spread the knowledge I have gathered in the past and divulge its reasoning to other people. Most of my philosophical and political so-called "enlightenments" have come about after reading a few selective articles, short stories, or excerpts from books that caused a great change in my process of thought. I decided that it'd be a nice idea to archive all of these articles into written form and at the same time display these written works to the interested public. To do this, I devised a simple, yet attractive idea: this topic.

This topic is intended to be a weekly publication of written works that I have gathered in the past and will gather in the future. The texts will range from philosophical to religious to political topics. Anything that has caused an impact on my thinking will be stored here. Every monday, a new publication will be released. Discussions to the publications shall not take place in this topic. I alone (and moderators; although I would object to any post/editing made by a moderator without my permission) can post in this topic. Separate topics may be created whenever a discussion to the reading is needed. I actively encourage people to read some of these publications whenever you have the time. It is essential that participation from the public is met if this idea is to work effectively. So here it is...

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I. On Religion; Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire (1694-1778). 11/14/05.



II. Tolerance in Islam; The Cultural Side of Islam. Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936). 11/21/05.



III. Everything that Rises Must Converge; Collected Works. Flannery O' Connor (1925-1964). 11/28/05.



IV. Che Guevara: Assassin and Bumbler; Humberto Fontova: Archives. Humberto Fontova (1954- ). 12/05/05.



V. The Swiss Defeat at the Battle of Marignano. Eric Niderost . 12/12/05.



VI. Excerpt of Part IV; Chapter 5; Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). 12/19/05.



VII. The French; Articles by Gary Brecher. Gary Brecher. 12/26/05.



VIII. The Bottom of the Barrel; The Guardian. George Monbiot (1964- ). 01/02/06.



IX. Saint Manuel, the Good Martyr; San Manuel Bueno mártir y tres historias más. Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936). 01/09/06.



X. Bartleby the Scrivener : A Story of Wall-Street; Bartleby and Other Stories (paperback). Herman Melville (1819-1891). 01/16/06.



XI. Thoughts on Dr. Stanley Milgram's Experiment. Imre von Soos. 01/23/06.



XII. The Tenor's Fall. Juan Andrés Siblesz. 02/06/06.



XIII. By the Waters of Babylon; Thirteen O'Clock (Hardcover). Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) . 02/13/06.



XIV. Requiem for the Morrow. Juan Andrés Siblesz. 02/20/06.



XV. The Thing Called Love--Be on Your Guard; Lucretius: On the Nature of Things (Loeb Classical Library) (Hardcover). Lucretius (c. 99 - c. 55 BCE). 02/27/06.



XVI. The Grand Inquisitor; The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). 03/06/06.



XVII. Voyage to Brobdingnag; Chapters V; Gulliver's Travels. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). 03/13/06.

[Siblesz]

IV. Che Guevara: Assassin and Bumbler, by Humberto Fontova

"SENTENCE first – VERDICT afterwards," said the Queen.
"Nonsense!" said Alice loudly.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

– Alice In Wonderland

They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted "Alice in Wonderland." A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward, where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves – what lunacy!

If only Carroll had lived a bit longer. If only he'd visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from the New York Times to the London Observer – when every pundit from Walter Lippman to Ed Murrow, every author from Jean Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious events since VJ day.

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)!"

To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed, two years later he featured several recently liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters – some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs – on his show for a fund raising where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.

This from last week's AP:

"At The Sundance Film Festival Robert Redford's film on Che Guevara "The Motorcycle Diaries" received a standing ovation." They say this was the only film so raptly received.

For the first year of Castro's glorious revolution Che Guevara was his main executioner – a combination Beria and Himmler, with a major exception: Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans – to scale, that is.

Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20,000 political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night of the Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.

Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed 500 death warrants, another says over 600. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime.

So the scope of the mass murder is unclear. So the exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. So the number of gagged and blindfolded men who Che sent – without trials – to be bound to a stake and blown apart by bullets runs from the hundreds to the thousands.

But the mass executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who oppose capitol punishment! Is there a psychiatrist in the house?!

The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Ask Barry Farber. He was there.

But vengeance – much less justice – had nothing to do with this bloodbath. Che's murderous method in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous method in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che's firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. His bloodbath decapitated – literally and figuratively the first ranks of Cuba's Contras.

Five years earlier, while a communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan officer corps rise against the Red regime of Jacobo Arbenz and send him hightailing to Czechoslovakia.

Che didn't want a repeat in Cuba. Equally important, his massacre cowed and terrorized. These were all public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were public too. Guevara made it a policy for his men to parade the families and friends of the executed before the blood-, bone- and brain-spattered paredon (The Wall, and Pink Floyd had nothing to do with this one).

The Red Terror had come to Cuba. "We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable ... we will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood! Let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible."

This from Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Soviet Cheka in 1918:

"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"

This from Che Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries," the very diaries just made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford – again, the only film to get that whoopin' hollerin' standing ovation at last month's Sundance Film Festival. Seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form his touching film.

The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men. He was a true Chekist: "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che commanded his prosecutorial goons. "A man is easier to cow at night, his mental resistance is always lower."

Che specialized in psychological torture. Many prisoners were yanked out of their cells, bound, blindfolded and stood against The Wall. The seconds ticked off. The condemned could hear the rifle bolts snapping ..... finally – FUEGO!!

BLAM!! But the shots were blanks. In his book, "Tocayo," Cuban freedom fighter Tony Navarro describes how he watched a man returned to his cell after such an ordeal. He'd left bravely, grim-faced as he shook hands with his fellow condemned. He came back mentally shattered, curling up in a corner of the squalid cell for days.

A real cutup, this Che Guevara. And now the same crowd moaning and wailing about the judicial rights of Guantanamo prisoners give this sadist a standing ovation and adorn themselves with his T-shirt! Again, is there a psychiatrist in the house?!

Che made "Alice in Wonderland's" Red Queen look like Oliver Wendell Holmes. His models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin. The Cheka came to Cuba with Guevara.

But in actual combat, his imbecilities defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted" Guevara, Groucho Marx in "Duck Soup" comes across like Hannibal.

His performance during the Bay of Pigs invasion says it all. The invasion plan included a CIA squad dispatching three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time-release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors and a tape recording of battle.

The wily Che immediately deciphered the imperialist scheme! That little feint 300 miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse! The REAL invasion was coming here in Pinar Del Rio! Che stormed over with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded and waited for the "Yankee/mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs and mirrors did their stuff just offshore.

Three days later the (literal) smoke and mirror show expended itself and Che's men marched back to Havana. Not surprisingly, the masterful Comandante had managed to wound himself in this heated battle against a tape recorder. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post-April '61 pictures of the gallant Che (the picture we see on posters and T-shirts was shot a year earlier.)

Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Fidelista at the time, speculates the wound may have come from a botched suicide attempt.

"No way!" say Che hagiographers John Lee Anderson, Carlos Castaneda and Paco Taibo. They insist it was an accident, Che's own pistol going off just under his face.

Fine, Che groupies. Maybe you're right. Maybe we're being unduly harsh on the man. Maybe the humiliation of being tricked into missing the major battle against imperialist mercenaries by an amplified tape recording and a few Roman candles wasn't enough to prompt suicide.

Instead, the sight of the bottle rocket's red glare and the sound of tape-recorded bombs bursting in air roused Che to a Pattonesque fury. He drew his pistol and prepared to lead the charge against the Yankee juggernaut. "Arriba muchachos!" he bellowed as his men sprung from their trenches with bayonets gleaming and charged a tape recorder. With the amplified soundtrack from "The Sands of Iwo Jima" blaring in the background Che stood atop a the tank turret and turned to his men. "Let's wipe 'em out!" he yelled while waving his pistol overhead in the manner of Clevon Little in "Blazing Saddles."

Then he managed to shoot himself through the chin. Fine.

I've called him cowardly. Yet in all fairness, we don't know. For the simple reason that the century's most celebrated guerrilla fighter never fought in a guerrilla war or anything even approximating one. The few puerile skirmishes again Batista's army in Cuba would have been shrugged off as a slow night by any Cripp or Blood. In Cuba Che couldn't fight anyone to fight against him. In the Congo he couldn't find any to fight with him. In Bolivia he finally started getting a tiny taste of both. In short order he was betrayed, brought to ground and routed.

Sadly, Guevara's legacy of terror and torture persists to this day and throughout the world. I refer to the professors who assign his writings.

I defy anyone to actually finish a Guevara book. I defy them to hack their way through the first five pages. Che's gibberish makes Babs Streisand sound like Cicero. He makes Hillary's ghostwriters read like Dave Barry. Beside him Al Gore and Hillary Rodham shine as the wackiest of cutups.

Food, drink, good cheer, bonhomie, roistering, fellowship – Guevara recoiled from these like Dracula from a cross. He went through life with a perpetual scowl, like Bella Abzug ... almost like Eleanor Clift.

As a professional duty I tortured myself with Che Guevara's writings. I finished glassy-eyed, dazed, almost catatonic. Nothing written by a first-year philosophy major (or a Total Quality Management guru) could be more banal, jargon-ridden, depressing or idiotic. A specimen:

"The past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness – in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily – but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodity relations still persist, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized."

Slap yourself and let's continue:

"To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane – or, vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research –we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, and to the cause of humanity."

Splash some cold water on your face and stick with me for just a little more:

"It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken."

Dude, this dork's image sells beer huggers and vodka! Again, is there a psychiatrist in the house?!

Throughout his diaries Che whines about deserters from his "guerilla" ranks (bored adolescents, petty crooks and winos playing army on the weekend). Can you BLAME them? Imagine sharing a campfire with some yo-yo droning on and on about "subjective aspirations not yet systematized" and "closely interdependent processes and total consciousness of social being" – and who also reeked like a polecat(foremost among the bourgeois debauchments disdained by Che were baths).

These hapless "deserters" were hunted down like animals, trussed up and brought back to a dispassionate Che, who put a pistol to their heads and blew their skulls apart without a second thought.

After days spent listening to Che and smelling him, perhaps this meant relief.

Nurse Ratched, Doug Neidermeyer, Col. Klink, Maj. Frank Burns – next to Guevara they're all the heartiest of partiers. Here's the guy who helped turn the hemisphere's party capital into a vast forced labor and prison camp – into the place with the highest (youth) emigration and suicide rate in the hemisphere, probably in the world. In 1961 Che even established a special concentration camp at Guanacahibes in extreme Western Cuba for "delinquents." This "delinquency" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music.

And Che's image adorns Grunge bands, jet-set models and spring break revelers! Again, is there a psychiatrist in the house?!

Who can blame Fidel for ducking into the nearest closet when this yo-yo came calling? Call Fidel everything in the book (as I have) but don't call him stupid. Guevara's inane twaddle must have driven him nuts. The one place where I can't fault Fidel, the one place I actually empathize with him, is in his craving to rid himself of this insufferable Argentine jackass.

That the Bolivian mission was clearly suicidal was obvious to anyone with half a brain. Fidel and Raul weren't about to join him down there –you can bet your sweet bippy on that.

But sure enough! Guevara saluted and was on his way post haste. Two months later he was dead. Bingo! Fidel scored another bulls-eye. He rid himself of the Argentine nuisance and his glorious revolution had a young handsome martyr for the adulation of imbeciles worldwide. Nice work.

Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel and cowardly. He was full of himself, a consummate fraud and an intellectual vacuum. He was intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke in clichés and was a glutton for publicity.

But ah! He DID come out nice in a couple of publicity photos, high cheekbones and all! And we wonder why he's a hit in Hollywood.

[Siblesz]

Sib add-on: I became aware of this article through the senatorii Trax in this ancient TWC topic.

V. The Swiss Defeat at the Battle of Marignano by Eric Niderost

0ne March day in 1515, ambassadors from the Republic of Venice sought audience with King Francis I of France. At the time, Venice, nicknamed “la Serenissima,” was anything but calm or serene, since Italy was not yet a nation, but only a patchwork of warring principalities, a fact that aroused the greed of outside powers.

Wily King Ferdinand of Spanish Aragon controlled much of Southern Italy, and Leo X’s papacy straddled the central peninsula. Both were enemies of Venice. And next door to the “Queen of the Adriatic,” in the Duchy of Milan, foreign Swiss mercenaries played puppet masters to a figurehead Sforza duke.

Venice urgently needed an ally and was seeking one in the French king. Ushered into his presence shortly after their arrival in Paris, the ambassadors no doubt took stock of their royal host and had good reason to like what they saw.

To begin with, Francis was young – barely 20 – and the mask of majesty often slipped to reveal the boyish exuberance with-in. He had hooded brown eyes, light-brown hair fashioned in a “pageboy” cut, and thick lips that gave a sensual, slightly worldly cast to his features.

The young king was clean-shaven (a beard would not sprout until 1519), and his nose was so monumental he would later be dubbed “le Roy Grand Nez.” King for a scant three months, the newly minted monarch won hearts by his impulsive generosity, keen spirit and athletic prowess. Muscular and well-proportioned, at 6 feet, he towered over most contemporaries.

The Venetians now laid their case before the king, but in fact they were preaching to the converted. Le Roy Grand Nez indeed was about to stick his pointed proboscis into Italian affairs. And there were precedents, not that King Francis really needed any. France periodically had invaded Italy over the last 20 years, though under the late King Louis XII, the Gauls had met bitter defeat at the hands of the Swiss at Novara.

Such defeats notwithstanding, Italy – especially the Duchy of Milan, with its fertile Lombard plains and magnificent Po River – was still an irresistible lure to the French.

In the audience granted to the Venetian emissaries, Francis declared he would not abandon their Venetian republic in its hour of need. “Very shortly,” he solemnly assured them, “I will come in person with a powerful army into Italy.”

True to his word, in the next few months Francis made preparations for war, with Swiss-controlled Milan to be the primary target.

As later years would amply demonstrate, the French king was a patron of the Renaissance, a man who loved art as much as he loved women, yet part of him was medieval, too. Al-most from birth his mother, Louise of Savoy, had filled his head with dreams of kingly conquest and knightly honor. Grooming him for greatness, Louise called her son “my Caesar,” and Francis was determined to live up to the pet name.

The French army reflected the semi feudal nature of the country itself. Heavily armored cavalrymen – men-at-arms from the so-called “companies of array” – provided the backbone of the king’s forces. There were great magnates like Duke Charles of Bourbon, with his 1,000 personal retainers, and impoverished lords with scarcely more than a sword and a pedigree.

The king could also rely on his bodyguard, composed of gentlemen “pensioners” and archers. The latter title was a courtesy, since these formidable warriors – a famous Scots contingent among them – had discarded their bows long since.

For infantry, Francis relied heavily on some 9,000 German Landsknechte, mercenaries who fought as long as the gold and silver flowed. Tough professionals, they wore little armor but wielded formidable 18-foot pikes. The king’s native French infantry numbered about 10,000, of which 6,000 were Gascon and Basque crossbowmen. On the whole, the French infantry had become a by-word for undependability, always ready to fight or flee as the mood struck them.

Though the French army was a mixed bag, the French artillery was perhaps the best in Europe. Cast in bronze, boasting the latest designs, the French fieldpieces were drawn by horse teams and fired real cannonballs, not stones. French gunners were experts who were known – and feared – for their rapid reloading. The royal artillery train featured 70 huge guns, seconded by 300 smaller pieces of ordnance.

Francis and his hot-blooded nobility were spoiling for a fight, but before they could come to grips with the Swiss enemy, the towering ramparts of the Alps would have to be crossed. Only a few well-worn passes – some hardly more than goat trails – cut through the precipitous cliffs.

Back in Lombardy, the Swiss were well aware of French preparations and were moving to checkmate the Gallic king. The two main passes into Italy were sealed by Swiss troops, who effectively blocked all land entry into the Italian peninsula as a result.

Anticipating such Swiss moves, Marshal Gian Giacomo Trivulzo (an Italian in French service) and Odet de Foix, vicomte de Lautrec, scoured the foothills on the French side to find a new way across the mountains. Local shepherds and chamois hunters revealed a series of passes through the Alps generally unknown to the out-side world. Better still, these “unknown” passes would enable the French to outflank the Swiss and make their defensive lines untenable.

Based upon this new information, the French army was divided into three sections for the perilous crossing. The first, under the king, would traverse the Col d’Argentiere; the second, consisting of the artillery, would proceed over Mount Genevre, and the third, a force of picked cavalry, would journey over the Col d’Angello. About 1,000 brawny sappers were sent ahead to try and widen the craggy goat trails into some-thing approximating roads. Boulders were heaved aside or blasted out of the way with liberal doses of gunpowder.

The French passage through the Alps must rank as one of the supreme epics of military history, if also one of the least known. In spite of the sappers’ best efforts, the "roads” they created were hardly more than narrow pathways perched on the edge of yawning chasms. Units marched single file, the cavalrymen dismounted and leading their mounts by their bridles. If and when a horse grew skittish and made a misstep, the animal fell, as one chronicler put it, “a half a league” onto the sharp rocks below.

At 6,545 feet above sea level, the thin mountain air of the Cor d’Argentiere taxed the lungs of the hardiest and made them gasp for air. Incredibly, the men-at-arms were marching on foot in full armor, a task that was nothing short of Herculean at that altitude. The artillerymen, too, faced a challenging task, manhandling their burdensome charges over treacherous ravines and deep gullies. At the peak of the ordeal, Francis wrote his mother a report of the passage, while noting, “Those who do not see it will not believe that anyone could bring over horses and heavy artillery the way we are doing....”

Five days later – it must have seemed five centuries – the French completed their journey and debauched onto the fertile Italian plain. Some 1,700 years be-fore, Hannibal had crossed the Alps with his elephants and his army and won immortality. A young French king, shepherding bronze behemoths instead of ponderous pachyderms, had duplicated the Carthaginian’s feat.

In a surprise coup, the French advance guard seized the town of Villafranca and most of the enemy cavalry, Swiss-allied papal horsemen under the command of the elderly Prospero Colonna. Around 300 prisoners were taken; old Colonna was grabbed just as he was about to sit down to dinner. Realizing they were out-flanked and – at least momentarily – out-witted, the Swiss troops pulled back to their main base at Milan, the French following in respectful pursuit. They had to be respectful because, in 1515, the Swiss were the most powerful military machine in Europe.

Switzerland was a collection of largely German-speaking states called can-tons. Though each canton jealously guarded its independence, the Swiss formed a confederation of the cantons for mutual support and defense. Tough and hearty, loving freedom as much as they loved their Alpine valleys, the Swiss amazed Europe when they defeated the army of the encroaching Duke Charles "the Bold” of Burgundy at Grandson. This victory in 1476 inaugurated a half-century of Swiss military prowess.

It was ironic that Swiss military greatness was founded on an anachronism. In an era when those harbingers of modern war, guns and gunpowder, were coming into general use, the Swiss revived the ancient Greek phalanx, large columns of men in serried ranks, each man armed with a pike 21 feet long – an 18-foot wooden shaft, surmounted by a 3-foot iron point. When the pike points were lowered, few if any armored knights could make headway against such a prickly “hedgehog.”

The Swiss were fiercely brave and highly disciplined, often marching in cadence to the sound of fifes and drums – the first army to parade in step since the Romans. But victory after victory made the sturdy mountaineers overconfident and at times somewhat greedy. Swiss pikemen were in high demand throughout Europe, so companies of “Alpine cowherds” hired themselves out as mercenaries. In time, gold, not liberty, animated the Swiss – and if pay were not forthcoming, strikes were not unknown.

In 16th-century Milan, though, the Swiss were only the nominal employees of Duke Maximillian Sforza. Switzerland had recently annexed part of the duchy (today’s Canton Tincino), and heavy Swiss taxes were imposed on the helpless Lombard peasantry. As much as they hated foreign invaders, most northern Italians probably viewed Francis as a liberator from Swiss oppression.

With the main Swiss army ensconced at Milan, Francis’ footsore and saddlesore legions halted a short distance from the city. The vanguard of the French army, led by Duke Charles of Bourbon, camped at the town of Marignano, but the bulk of the troops were with the king at Santa Brigeta.

For the next few weeks there was a curious lull while Francis tried to bribe the Swiss to go home. Among other inducements, the young monarch offered 700,000 gold crowns and an annual subsidy to each canton.

Francis had judged the Swiss well. Though warlike, they found peace acceptable if tied to profit. Unfortunately for the Swiss, however, their democratic instincts, so admirable at home, made for anarchy while on campaign. Major decisions were made by a fractious council of captains. More debating society than general staff, the council in this instance analyzed, scrutinized and endlessly discussed the French offer. One of their number, Albrecht van Stein, was secretly on the French payroll and used all his powers of persuasion to clinch the deal.

Thanks in part to van Stein’s eloquence, the captains of Berne, Fribourg and Valais agreed to accept the French bounty and go home. On September 8, they signed a treaty with Francis and led their 12,000 men back to Switzerland. The rest of the Swiss – perhaps as many as 20,000 troops – refused to budge, their resolve strengthened by Cardinal Matthaus Schinner, a poisonous prelate who called for the spilling of French blood in the most graphic terms.

On the morning of September 13, 1515, thousands upon thousands of Swiss pikemen poured out of Milan’s Roman Gate, rank after rank, but marching without the customary beat of drums. The march was to be conducted in relative silence, because it was hoped the French might be surprised in their encampments.

The heat was intense, and as the long files of men tramped down the road, their marching feet kicked up plumes of dust. Their very dust then proved their undoing, because the tell-tale clouds betrayed the Swiss’ movement. French lookouts noted the enemy’s approach and alerted their army that an attack was imminent.

At that moment King Francis was in his chamber trying on some new armor. German-made, as were all the best suits of the period, it was tastefully decorated with blue enamel devices and fit the king like a second skin. The metallic rig allegedly was so closely fitted that no weapon could pierce it. While servants scurried about, adjusting the suit for his royal comfort, Francis no doubt took pride in his martial bearing and majestic poise.

But then came a boyhood friend, Robert de la March, Seigneur de Fleurange. Fleurange had urgent news – even as they spoke, the Swiss were falling upon the French vanguard at Marignano, 10 miles to the southeast of Milan.

French trumpeters raised instruments to their lips and shattered the muggy air with high-flown notes of alarm as the French camp roused itself to action. And indeed, a few scant miles away, their comrades in the vanguard were engaged in a desperate battle for survival. Three Swiss phalanx formations of 7,000 or 8,000 men each were barreling down on their outnumbered Gallic foes. The men in the first three ranks of each phalanx lowered their weapons shoulder-high and moved off in a disciplined trot. Phalanx frontage rarely exceeded 30 men, but the Phalanx often was 150 men deep. The tactic was of a simple bludgeon to punch a hole in the enemy line by sheer momentum and weight of numbers.

As the Swiss attacked, they would have presented a colorful if frightening sight to their hard-pressed foes. Wearing striped hose of various hues, puffed sleeve jerkins and jaunty bonnets, their martial air was only slightly dimmed by the patina of dust that covered them. Few wore any kind of armor, as if they despised such “cowardly” protection. Here and there, bright canton flags blossomed in the pike “groves,” rallying points in the heat of battle. The flags also marked the Swiss dispositions. As befitted their seniority in the confederation, the old cantons – Uri, Unterwalden and Schwyz – made up the Swiss center, while the Swiss left was anchored by troops from Basle, Schaffhausen and Lucerne. The Swiss left was held by men from Glaurus, Appenzel, St. Gall and Zurich. A young chaplain named Zwingli marched with his fellow Zurichers, scarcely imagining that in a few short years he would be a major figure in the Protestant Reformation.

The terrain around Marignano favored the defense. Much of the ground was a treeless plain, true, but its flat surface was broken by canals and rice fields. Still silent, grim-faced, the Swiss at first drove the French light cavalry before them. Their forward momentum was broken by a ditch, but even so they slammed into the German Landsknechte with the force of a pile driver. Teutons fell in heaps, and the survivors began to give way. In the first rush, the Swiss captured 15 of Francis’ precious artillery pieces.

But the Landsknechte had pikes, too, and rallied to give the Swiss a taste of their own spiky medicine. The two sides collided in a jumble of pikes, transforming the contest into a brutal and bloody tug of war. Putting their backs into it, the Germans would force the Swiss back a few yards, only to have their positions reversed a few moments later.

Then, suddenly, King Francis arrived with his cavalry, bursting on the scene as the answer to a Gallic prayer. Like his companions, the king was covered in armor from head to foot. His long-nosed features were hidden by a plumed helmet and closed visor, but few could fail to recognize the king as he galloped boldly forward, lance couched under his arm. He was mounted on a huge war horse that was covered with a blue velvet "trapper” festooned with crowned F’s and spangled with golden fleurs-de-lis.

The king and his companions mounted a flank attack against the Swiss host, checking though not stopping their steamrolling advance. The battle soon degenerated into a bloody bludgeoning match, with little quarter asked or given. In fact, the Swiss had mutually pledged to spare no Frenchman except the king himself. It was to be a war of total extermination.

The battle seesawed back and forth, now the Swiss seemingly on the verge of victory, a moment later fortune smiling on the Gauls. Francis personally led charge after charge – some said as many as 30 separate advances – and, as he fought, the royal warrior and his men were like woodcutters paring down the pike “forest,” tree by tree. In the meantime the young monarch’s new Venetian allies had yet to put in their appearance.

During brief lulls in the fray, when opposing sides parted to regroup or rally, French artillery opened up on the stubbornly brave Swiss, plowing great gory lanes into their packed ranks. Cannonballs lopped off limbs, beheaded and disemboweled with horrifying ease, but the mountaineers refused to break off the battle. And since the Swiss had few guns of their own, the artillery barrage provided a one-sided slaughter.

Lengthening shadows combined with coils of dust to create a true “fog of war.” In a battle of sheer butchery, the French and the Swiss were literally blind gladiators as they groped for a vital spot. Few won any laurels in this pounding match, save perhaps for Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayard. Bayard was a magnificent anachronism in a Machiavellian age. Courtly and chivalrous, handy with a sword or a lance, Bayard was Sir Lancelot “reborn,” though without the latter’s roving eye for married ladies.

As time wore on, even Bayard, the knight of knights, “sans peur et sans reproache,” was having a hard time. When unchivalrous Swiss pikes cut his horse’s bridle, he was forced to dismount near some grapevine stakes. All the dust, combined with black powder smoke, had cut visibility to almost zero by this point. Lost in the gloom, but knowing the enemy was all around, Bayard cast off his helmet to see better. He also discarded his leg armor for better mobility.

The French knight crawled on all fours through the muck of drainage ditches (so much for knightly romance!), probably expecting a lethal pike thrust at any moment. Finally, shouts of “France! France!” through the choking darkness guided him to his own lines.

The dull ring of steel against steel, the screams of the wound-ed, and the basso profundo bellowing of the cannons created a fearful din, mixed with the rattle of drums and squeal of fifes calling attack or retreat. At one point, Francis made a desperate charge with only 25 men, but he emerged unscathed.

When the sun finally sank into a cushion of smoke and dust, and night fell, the battle simply raged on under the moon’s impassive eye. Men-at-arms abandoned their mounts to fight on foot with sword and axe, hacking, stabbing, thrusting at their stubborn opponents. Toward midnight, though, the battle finally slowed and stopped, due to the sheer exhaustion of the participants. The moon must have set because, according to chronicles of the event, the troops didn’t know where they were as they groped and stumbled through the inky void. The debris of battle, the dead and wounded, men and animals, made a horrific obstacle course for the weary soldiers feeling their way in the dark.

Numb with fatigue, battered and disoriented, it is recorded, too, numbers of Swiss and Frenchmen actually bedded down with each other when they couldn’t find their own lines. In the midst of the carnage, Francis leaned heavily against a gun carriage. Just yesterday – or was it a century ago’.– the king had turned 21. The Swiss had certainly provided him quite a “coming-of-age” party!

Still in armor, his body had been pummeled by many blows and, dehydrated from fighting in a metal suit all day under a blazing sun, the king cried for water to slake a burning thirst. Hearing his request, his trumpeter went to a nearby irrigation ditch and filled a helmet with water in the darkness. The king gratefully accepted the brimming helmet and took a large swallow – only to spew the contents out with disgust. The water, it seemed, was heavy with mud and blood.

When dawn broke, both sides prepared to renew the conflict French trumpets played shrill martial tunes, accompanied by the mournful bellowing of the “Bull of Uri" and the “Cow of Unterualden,” two great Swiss Alphorns that rallied the mountaineers. It was now Friday, September 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross, normally a day for quiet prayer... but not here.

Francis drew up his bloodied legions into three divisions: the left was commanded by the Duke of Bourbon, the center bv the king, and the right by the Duke of Alencon. The Swiss massed a human “battering ram” of 8,000 pikemen against the French center, supported by two cannons. The Swiss also hail a few arquebusiers – matchlock musketeers – but, as always they chiefly relied on the pike.

The Swiss attacked with their customary fierceness, but were unable to break through the French lines. French cannon flamed and recoiled, and the air was filled with French crossbow bolts as the Swiss masses drew near. The Swiss reaped nothing but casualties in the center, but their supporting plalanxes made some headway against the French right under Alencon. As the mountaineers pressed forward, they pushed Alencon's' troops back to Marignano and sowed the seeds of panic. Afraid and confused, French soldiers of the right began shouting "All is lost!" as they withdrew.

The crisis of the battle was near at hand. Victory hung in the balance, and fortune could smile on either side. The French right was falling back in disarray, yet the French left and center held firm. Both sides were exhausted, but the Swiss were taking a terrible mauling from the well-served French cannons.

Then, about 8 o’clock in the morning, shouts of “Marco! Marco!” could be heard above the clamor of battle – Francis’ Venetian allies at last had arrived! And, in the end, the infusion of 12,000 fresh Venetians would tip the scales in favor of the French. The Battle of Marignano now lost, 28 hours after it had begun, the Swiss disengaged and withdrew to Milan. Four hundred Zurichers, left as a rear guard, repulsed a body of Venetian cavalry before being shot to pieces by Francis’ ravenous cannons.

The invincible Swiss had been defeated, vanquished by a combination of hard fighting, artillery and just plain good luck – many people could scarcely believe the terrors of Europe had been destroyed. But there, on the grisly battlefield, was the proof – between 16,000 and 17,000 corpses littered the ground under a broiling sun, and the wounded seemed numberless. Perhaps 5,000 had fallen on the French side. The remainder – more than 10,000 – were Swiss.

Francis had won a remarkable victory over the premiere fighting force of Europe, and in spite of the carnage all around him, the king’s basically romantic nature reasserted itself. He had almost been killed – a deep rent in his visor bore mute testimony to that. Still, he had triumphed, and he was determined to celebrate the event.

Summoning the legendary Bayard to his side, the king asked the chevalier to knight him on the battlefield. Francis must have felt he won his spurs, and was determined to mark his passage into manhood. Bayard protested, since, as king, Francis already was considered the font of chivalry, but the young monarch insisted. The chevalier complied with the request and tapped his blade lightly on the kneeling king’s shoulders. As Francis rose, Bayard declared that a sword that performed such a ceremony was no ordinary weapon. Henceforth, Bayard explained, he would use this sword only against Turk, Saracen, or Moor – that is, on a holy crusade.

The French victory was complete. Acknowledging the outcome, Switzerland evacuated Lombardy and signed a “perpetual peace” with the northern kingdom, a pact that was to last until the French Revolution more than 300 years later. Milan – together with Lombardy – was annexed to the French crown.

For 10 more years Francis’ star was high, but in the long run, French hegemony in Italy was as ephemeral as Marignano’s dust clouds. Embroiled in a war with the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, Francis lost a decisive battle and was himself captured at Pavia in 1525.

Marignano, meanwhile, would remain a historic milestone, because it helped to give birth to modern warfare, because it was a place where guns and powder supplanted the pike and the sword. No longer could men rely on medieval – even ancient – techniques of war to achieve victory. The Age of Ordinance had begun.

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Author Eric Niderost's ancestor Martin Niderist (as the name was then spelled) of Canton Schwyz fell at Marignano. For further reading, please try Desmond Seward’s Prince of the Renaissance: The Golden Life of Francis I, (Macmillan, New York, 1973) with its excellent account of the Battle of Marignano.

[Siblesz]

VI. Excerpt from Part IV; Chapter 5 of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You wouldn’t have supposed it, eh? Wait a bit, I shall take you in, too. Ha-ha-ha! No, I’ll tell you the truth. All these questions about crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article of yours which interested me at the time. ‘On Crime’ . . . or something of the sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the Periodical Review.”

“My article? In the Periodical Review?” Raskolnikov asked in astonishment. “I certainly did write an article upon a book six months ago when I left the university, but I sent it to the Weekly Review.”

“But it came out in the Periodical.”

“And the Weekly Review ceased to exist, so that’s why it wasn’t printed at the time.”

“That’s true; but when it ceased to exist, the Weekly Review was amalgamated with the Periodical, and so your article appeared two months ago in the latter. Didn’t you know?”

Raskolnikov had not known.

“Why, you might get some money out of them for the article! What a strange person you are! You lead such a solitary life that you know nothing of matters that concern you directly. It’s a fact, I assure you.”

“Bravo, Rodya! I knew nothing about it either!” cried Razumihin. “I’ll run to-day to the reading-room and ask for the number. Two months ago? What was the date? It doesn’t matter though, I will find it. Think of not telling us!”

“How did you find out that the article was mine? It’s only signed with an initial.”

“I only learnt it by chance, the other day. Through the editor; I know him. . . . I was very much interested.”

“I analysed, if I remember, the psychology of a criminal before and after the crime.”

“Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but . . . it was not that part of your article that interested me so much, but an idea at the end of the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are certain persons who can . . . that is, not precisely are able to, but have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the law is not for them.”

Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his idea.

“What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the influence of environment?” Razumihin inquired with some alarm even.

“No, not exactly because of it,” answered Porfiry. “In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”

“What do you mean? That can’t be right?” Razumihin muttered in bewilderment.

Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.

“That wasn’t quite my contention,” he began simply and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right . . . that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep . . . certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity). You say that my article isn’t definite; I am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound . . . to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all . . . well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed—often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law—were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. You see that there is nothing particularly new in all that. The same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before. As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and vive la guerre éternelle—till the New Jerusalem, of course!”

“Then you believe in the New Jerusalem, do you?”

“I do,” Raskolnikov answered firmly; as he said these words and during the whole preceding tirade he kept his eyes on one spot on the carpet.

“And . . . and do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity.”

“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.

“And . . . do you believe in Lazarus’ rising from the dead?”

“I . . . I do. Why do you ask all this?”

“You believe it literally?”

“Literally.”

“You don’t say so. . . . I asked from curiosity. Excuse me. But let us go back to the question; they are not always executed. Some, on the contrary . . .”

“Triumph in their lifetime? Oh, yes, some attain their ends in this life, and then . . .”

“They begin executing other people?”

“If it’s necessary; indeed, for the most part they do. Your remark is very witty.”

“Thank you. But tell me this: how do you distinguish those extraordinary people from the ordinary ones? Are there signs at their birth? I feel there ought to be more exactitude, more external definition. Excuse the natural anxiety of a practical law-abiding citizen, but couldn’t they adopt a special uniform, for instance, couldn’t they wear something, be branded in some way? For you know if confusion arises and a member of one category imagines that he belongs to the other, begins to ‘eliminate obstacles’ as you so happily expressed it, then . . .”

“Oh, that very often happens! That remark is wittier than the other.”

“Thank you.”

“No reason to; but take note that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people (as I perhaps unfortunately called them). In spite of their predisposition to obedience very many of them, through a playfulness of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, ‘destroyers,’ and to push themselves into the ‘new movement,’ and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling tendencies. But I don’t think there is any considerable danger here, and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course, they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away with them and to teach them their place, but no more; in fact, even this isn’t necessary as they castigate themselves, for they are very conscientious: some perform this service for one another and others chastise themselves with their own hands. . . . They will impose various public acts of penitence upon themselves with a beautiful and edifying effect; in fact you’ve nothing to be uneasy about. . . . It’s a law of nature.”

“Well, you have certainly set my mind more at rest on that score; but there’s another thing worries me. Tell me, please, are there many people who have the right to kill others, these extraordinary people? I am ready to bow down to them, of course, but you must admit it’s alarming if there are a great many of them, eh?”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that either,” Raskolnikov went on in the same tone. “People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so in fact. One thing only is clear, that the appearance of all these grades and sub-divisions of men must follow with unfailing regularity some law of nature. That law, of course, is unknown at present, but I am convinced that it exists, and one day may become known. The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence. One in ten thousand perhaps—I speak roughly, approximately—is born with some independence, and with still greater independence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions. In fact I have not peeped into the retort in which all this takes place. But there certainly is and must be a definite law, it cannot be a matter of chance.”

“Why, are you both joking?” Razumihin cried at last. “There you sit, making fun of one another. Are you serious, Rodya?”

Raskolnikov raised his pale and almost mournful face and made no reply. And the unconcealed, persistent, nervous, and discourteous sarcasm of Porfiry seemed strange to Razumihin beside that quiet and mournful face.

“Well, brother, if you are really serious . . . You are right, of course, in saying that it’s not new, that it’s like what we’ve read and heard a thousand times already; but what is really original in all this, and is exclusively your own, to my horror, is that you sanction bloodshed in the name of conscience, and, excuse my saying so, with such fanaticism. . . . That, I take it, is the point of your article. But that sanction of bloodshed by conscience is to my mind . . . more terrible than the official, legal sanction of bloodshed. . . .”

“You are quite right, it is more terrible,” Porfiry agreed.

“Yes, you must have exaggerated! There is some mistake, I shall read it. You can’t think that! I shall read it.”

“All that is not in the article, there’s only a hint of it,” said Raskolnikov.

“Yes, yes.” Porfiry couldn’t sit still. “Your attitude to crime is pretty clear to me now, but . . . excuse me for my impertinence (I am really ashamed to be worrying you like this), you see, you’ve removed my anxiety as to the two grades getting mixed, but . . . there are various practical possibilities that make me uneasy! What if some man or youth imagines that he is a Lycurgus or Mahomet—a future one of course—and suppose he begins to remove all obstacles. . . . He has some great enterprise before him and needs money for it . . . and tries to get it . . . do you see?”

Zametov gave a sudden guffaw in his corner. Raskolnikov did not even raise his eyes to him.

“I must admit,” he went on calmly, “that such cases certainly must arise. The vain and foolish are particularly apt to fall into that snare; young people especially.”

“Yes, you see. Well then?”

“What then?” Raskolnikov smiled in reply; “that’s not my fault. So it is and so it always will be. He said just now (he nodded at Razumihin) that I sanction bloodshed. Society is too well protected by prisons, banishment, criminal investigators, penal servitude. There’s no need to be uneasy. You have but to catch the thief.”

“And what if we do catch him?”

“Then he gets what he deserves.”

“You are certainly logical. But what of his conscience?”

“Why do you care about that?”

“Simply from humanity.”

“If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment—as well as the prison.”

“But the real geniuses,” asked Razumihin frowning, “those who have the right to murder? Oughtn’t they to suffer at all even for the blood they’ve shed?”

“Why the word ought? It’s not a matter of permission or prohibition. He will suffer if he is sorry for his victim. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,” he added dreamily, not in the tone of the conversation.

He raised his eyes, looked earnestly at them all, smiled, and took his cap. He was too quiet by comparison with his manner at his entrance, and he felt this. Everyone got up.

“Well, you may abuse me, be angry with me if you like,” Porfiry Petrovitch began again, “but I can’t resist. Allow me one little question (I know I am troubling you). There is just one little notion I want to express, simply that I may not forget it.”

“Very good, tell me your little notion,” Raskolnikov stood waiting, pale and grave before him.

“Well, you see . . . I really don’t know how to express it properly. . . . It’s a playful, psychological idea. . . . When you were writing your article, surely you couldn’t have helped, he-he! fancying yourself . . . just a little, an ‘extraordinary’ man, uttering a new word in your sense. . . . That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Quite possibly,” Raskolnikov answered contemptuously.

Razumihin made a movement.

“And, if so, could you bring yourself in case of worldly difficulties and hardship or for some service to humanity—to overstep obstacles? . . . For instance, to rob and murder?”

And again he winked with his left eye, and laughed noiselessly just as before.

“If I did I certainly should not tell you,” Raskolnikov answered with defiant and haughty contempt.

“No, I was only interested on account of your article, from a literary point of view . . .”

“Foo! how obvious and insolent that is!” Raskolnikov thought with repulsion.

“Allow me to observe,” he answered dryly, “that I don’t consider myself a Mahomet or a Napoleon, nor any personage of that kind, and not being one of them I cannot tell you how I should act.”

“Oh, come, don’t we all think ourselves Napoleons now in Russia?” Porfiry Petrovitch said with alarming familiarity.

Something peculiar betrayed itself in the very intonation of his voice.

“Perhaps it was one of these future Napoleons who did for Alyona Ivanovna last week?” Zametov blurted out from the corner.

Raskolnikov did not speak, but looked firmly and intently at Porfiry. Razumihin was scowling gloomily. He seemed before this to be noticing something. He looked angrily around. There was a minute of gloomy silence. Raskolnikov turned to go.

[Siblesz]

VII. The French by Gary Brecher

The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like "I Hate France," with supposed datelines of French military history, supposedly proving how the French are total cowards. If you want to see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

Well, I'm going to tell you guys something you probably don't want to hear: these sites are total :wub:, the notion that the French are cowards is total :wub:, and anybody who knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over the past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in Europe, maybe the world.

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry 'do and the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he's not just being ignorant, he's being ungrateful. I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.

When I say ungrateful, I'm talking about the American Revolution. If you're a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters. Hell, most of you probably couldn't name three major battles from it, but try going back to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth grade and you might recall a little place called Yorktown, Virginia, where we bottled up Cornwallis's army, forced the Brits' surrender and pretty much won the war.

Well, news flash: "we" didn't win that battle, any more than the Northern Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy won Yorktown for us. Americans didn't have the materiel or the training to mount a combined operation like that, with naval blockade and land siege. It was the French artillery forces and military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it was a French admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the **** out of the British navy when they tried to break the siege.

Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga that we could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge shipments of everything from cannon to uniforms. We'd never have got near Yorktown if it wasn't for massive French aid.

So how come you bastards don't mention Yorktown in your cheap webpages? I'll tell you why: because you're too ignorant to know about it and too dishonest to mention it if you did.

The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much when they only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not hate the Brits? They're the ones who killed thousands of Americans in the Revolution, and thirty years later they came back and attacked us again. That time around they managed to burn Washington DC to the ground while they were at it. How come you web jerks never mention that?

Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the French aren't. But being a war buff means knowing your history and respecting it.

Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let's talk about ignorant. And that's what you are if you think the French can't fight: just plain ignorant. Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about the most basic way you can distinguish real war nerds from fake little teachers'pets.

Let's take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when the French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht. This is the only real evidence you'll find to call the French cowards, and the more you know about it, the less it proves. Yeah, the French were scared of Hitler. Who wasn't? Chamberlain, the British prime minister, all but licked the Fuhrer's goosesteppers, basically let him have all of Central Europe, because Britain was terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a sweetheart deal with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn't a man who scared easy.

The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For starters, they'd barely begun to recover from their last little scrap with the Germans: a little squabble you might've heard of, called WW I.

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I'd really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about "surrender monkeys" with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You'd **** your dockers.

****, we strut around like we're so tough and we can't even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the French, who said "calf rope."

When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier fortifications and used their tanks (which were better than the Germans', one on one) defensively. The Germans had a newer, better offensive strategy. So they won. And the French surrendered. Which was damn sensible of them.

This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western Europe and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That's less than the casualties of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army on earth, could've held off the Germans under the conditions that the French faced them. The French lost because they had a long land border with Germany. The English survived because they had the English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When the English Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the tuck-tail-and-flee result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in the face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It's that simple.

Here's a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like an antidote to those ignorant websites. We'll start way back and move up to the 20th century.

Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on their way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance of stopping them was the French army under Charles "the Hammer" Martel, King of the Franks (French), who answered to the really cool nickname "the Hammer of God." It was the French who saved the continent's ass. All the smart money was on the Muslims: there were 60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry was faster and deadlier than any in Europe. The French army was heavily outnumbered and had no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against dozens of cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand combat, finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe developed as an independent civilization.

Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool military commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets instructions from her favorite saints to help out the French against the English invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but close enough) and tells him to give her the army and she'll take it from there. And somehow she convinces him. She takes the army, which has lost every battle it's been in lately, to Orleans, which is under English siege. Now Joan is a nice girl, so she tries to settle things peaceably. She explains in a letter to the enemy commanders that everything can still be cool, "...provided you give up France...and go back to your own countries, for God's sake. And if you do not, wait for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great sorrow." The next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to lead the attack on the besiegers' fortifications. She ordered the gates opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she, personally, would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French sallied out, and Joan led the first successful attack they'd made in years. The English strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken, and Joan's career in the cow-milking trade was over.

Braddock's Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time you're driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you're passing near the site of a great French victory over an Anglo-American force twice its size. General Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia with 1,500 men -- a very large army in 18th-c. America. His orders were to seize French land and forts in the Valley -- your basic undeclared land-grab invasion. The French joined the local tribes to resist, and then set up a classic ambush. It was a slaughter. More than half of Braddock's force -- 880 men -- were killed or wounded. The only Anglo officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George Washington, and even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few minutes of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods, Braddock's command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet. Braddock was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk getting shot to rescue him.

Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as "Napoleon's Greatest Victory," like the little guy personally went out and wiped out the combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact is, ever since the Revolution in 1789, French armies had been kicking ass against everybody. They were free citizens fighting against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries, and it was no contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000 Russians and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with superb troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then brought up reinforcements who'd been held out of sight. That kind of tactical plan takes iron discipline and perfect timing -- and the French had it.

Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the Germans always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army and destroys it. 27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French. Prussian army routed, pursued for miles by French cavalry.

You eXile guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon are still the only army ever to have taken all of continental Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. I could keep listing French victories till I had a book. In fact, it's not a bad idea. A nice big hardback, so you could take it to the :wub:s running all the anti-French-military sites and bash their heads in with it.

[Siblesz]

VIII. Bottom of the Barrel by George Monbiot

The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to talk about it?

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days.

Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.

Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.

The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by the US department of energy, which claims that this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets.

Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010. In August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global production will be 2004. Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping the oil barrel within the lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged today.

The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will not. Today we will burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day, after which projected demand accelerates. If supply declines and demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the people of the advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage. The price of oil will go through the roof.

As the price rises, the sectors which are now almost wholly dependent on crude oil - principally transport and farming - will be forced to contract. Given that climate change caused by burning oil is cooking the planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The problem is that our lives have become hard-wired to the oil economy. Our sprawling suburbs are impossible to service without cars. High oil prices mean high food prices: much of the world's growing population will go hungry. These problems will be exacerbated by the direct connection between the price of oil and the rate of unemployment. The last five recessions in the US were all preceded by a rise in the oil price.

Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles can run. There are plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is likely to be anywhere near as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be extracted from tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process uses almost as much energy as it liberates, while creating great mountains and lakes of toxic waste. Natural gas is a better option, but switching from oil to gas propulsion would require a vast and staggeringly expensive new fuel infrastructure. Gas, of course, is subject to the same constraints as oil: at current rates of use, the world has about 50 years' supply, but if gas were to take the place of oil its life would be much shorter.

Vehicles could be run from fuel cells powered by hydrogen, which is produced by the electrolysis of water. But the electricity which produces the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To fill all the cars in the US would require four times the current capacity of the national grid. Coal burning is filthy, nuclear energy is expensive and lethal. Running the world's cars from wind or solar power would require a greater investment than any civilisation has ever made before. New studies suggest that leaking hydrogen could damage the ozone layer and exacerbate global warming.

Turning crops into diesel or methanol is just about viable in terms of recoverable energy, but it means using the land on which food is now grown for fuel. My rough calculations suggest that running the United Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would require an area of arable fields the size of England.

There is one possible solution which no one writing about the impending oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique with which the British and Australian governments are currently experimenting, called underground coal gasification. This is a fancy term for setting light to coal seams which are too deep or too expensive to mine, and catching the gas which emerges. It's a hideous prospect, as it means that several trillion tonnes of carbon which was otherwise impossible to exploit becomes available, with the likely result that global warming will eliminate life on Earth.

We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses.

The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.

In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing to do with oil is simply preposterous. The US attacked Iraq (which appears to have had no weapons of mass destruction and was not threatening other nations), rather than North Korea (which is actively developing a nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its intentions to blow everyone else to kingdom come) because Iraq had something it wanted. In one respect alone, Bush and Blair have been making plans for the day when oil production peaks, by seeking to secure the reserves of other nations.

I refuse to believe that there is not a better means of averting disaster than this. I refuse to believe that human beings are collectively incapable of making rational decisions. But I am beginning to wonder what the basis of my belief might be.

[Siblesz]

I'm gonna try something different this time... Here's the introduction to a major writing project I'm working on. Hope you guys enjoy it.

XII.The Tenor's Fall by Juan Andres Siblesz

A loud, screeching noise of eerie and forceful emotion could be heard coming from the corner. It started as a mere drop of rain, yet the sound slowly crept into the room and allowed itself space to expand. It was a subliminal thump as it begun, yet now it gained momentum and became fiercer. I woke up from a heavy dose of sleep on the floor right after the escalating blasts of the noise. The room in which I found myself was solemn and claustrophobic. It had no windows and no doors. It was a room enclosed by walls, walls made of a strong, brick-layer material. There was one light flickering on the ceiling of the East section of the room. It illuminated only that half of the room, while the other half was positively dark and mysterious in form. The walls were covered in a shade of black and white paint. The white paint fell on the dark side of the room, while the black on the bright side. The floor was of heavy oak wood. It had a scent resembling that of a pristine forest on a day of spring. I bent over and smelled it in peaceful contemplation. It filled me with great pleasure to do this, pleasure that I felt guilty for enjoying. The room suppressed this pleasure. Its soul looked at me with condescending eyes as it thumped once again. I clearly understood its threat, stopped in my tracks, and stood up in composed stature. Having foreboded warning, I walked around in circles for minutes on end. It is difficult to understand how this particular room enticed my attention and began by tempting me to caress it. I felt right at home. The room felt oddly familiar, and I made myself comfortable by leaning on the lit black wall.

The noise hit the room again. It fell on intervals, each time seeming faster-paced and louder than its antecedent. The noise was coming from the dark side of the room. I carefully went west to examine it, and once I reached it, I leaned my back against the dark white side of the wall. Having sat down, I stared at the other side of the room, radiated by the brilliance of the light, yet suppressed by the black coat of paint that covered it. I wished to go back to the lit side, yet an uncontrollable desire to stay within the confines of the dark made me do so. The sound persisted, building itself a base on which to grow. I placed my ear against the wall in order to try and make out its source. I fixed my gaze on the floor in determinate confoundment as the beat continued, repeating itself again and again, each time growing louder, while deeply penetrating the chords of my ears. Searching further in, I then knocked against the wall in a fit of anger in an attempt to stop it. I flinched my eyes as it slowly, but persistently, continued. I struck the wall again, only this time, my fist smashed against the brick wall in force. The sound reached a heavy pitch. It pierced my soul with excruciating pain. I stood up from the floor and continued banging against the wall, now in desperate impatience. The noise became stronger, clearer, and all the more aggressive. It warred against me, digging through my senses, and ripping them apart with evil intention.

I was trembling with fear. My hands and legs were shaking. The rain had grown from a few passive drops to an apocalyptic malicious thunderstorm. It began to rip my ears apart. I vehemently continued banging my fists against the wall, displeased and displeasured at how a sound so terrible could perturb my peace in such a forceful and menacing manner. My fists were being crushed as I did so, but the pain of hearing the noise was greater than that of hitting the wall. I wanted it to stop. No… I needed it to stop! It grew stronger. The orchestral fury augmented in fierce tremor. I felt overwhelmed and diminished as it kept condemning me. In a frenzied fit of hysteria, I banged against the wall with the furies of the titans, swearing by God to have the noise cease its perpetual torture. There was no answer to my call. The sound continued. I was on my knees, begging for it to cease. But it hit again. It was cracking my skull. I banged my bloodied fists again, this time, against my forehead. The noise had slipped unabashed and without opposition into my ears and was roaring from my insides. It dawned upon me that this might be the end of my time, and my grave would be marked upon this cursed room. Oh how I feared the imminence of the tenor’s fall!

I placed my hands around my ears, crushing them into my skull in order to soften the blows of each fearless clang. It continued forth diligently as if destined for a bloody conclusion. It cried out with the shouts of one thousand suffering souls of the abyss. It restarted, only to cease beating for a few instances and then resume its dreadful course. It struck yet again! I could not bear the noise. I took my hands off my ears and gazed at them with crazed wonder. They were covered in blood. I began yelling in agony, crying in desperation for the caesura of the clamor. I reached my hands to my ears again, and noticed where the blood was coming from. My ears were bleeding. Blood dripped down my neck and chest, soaking my clothes in red. I ran back to the lit side of the room, yelling incomprehensible words. The sound in the other side was not softer as I expected it to be. It had grown louder. It surrounded me, dismembering my body bit by bit. It offered no truce or remorse for my decaying state. The demons of the walls oppressed me, marching on against me with the drums of all wars. The black room started to infiltrate the white. Streams of black swarmed against me, inundating the room and choking it from what little life and happiness it may have had. Now, the room was completely black. There was no hope. Blood dripped from my nose. It clogged my breathing, asphyxiating me from within. I gasped for what little air I could inhale, but to no avail.

The sound persisted. I collapsed on the floor. My blood soaked the wooded floor and created a red lake. Its streams fell through the cracks of the wood, but dripped right back from the ceiling. My face was on the floor, one side opened towards the ceiling, the other, closed towards the floor. I could see myself from the reflection of my own blood. My face had taken a Dionysian contour as if red wine were poured from the top of my skull. Terror marked my expression. My eyes blazed against the blood, sparkling with tragic demise and suffering. I brushed the blood aside with my bare hands and crawled around the floor in a last attempt at salvation. I found no way out, and collapsed flat on the floor. I had given up. All at once, I had irresistible urge to smell the floor, calling it out in desperate need of a portion of pleasure to end my life with. All the pains that surrounded me subsided for an instance. I smelled it in passionate disposition, but I could not… not anymore. Tears flowed from my eyes, mixing with the blood of the floor. I stopped breathing all at once. I looked at the flickering light as my eyes opened and closed with escalating effort. It was weakening as I was. It was like me… in its last desperate struggle for survival. But the demons overwhelmed it. The light abruptly ceased its beat and exhausted itself. The room was now completely dark. The noise stopped, and my heart did so as well.

[Siblesz]

XIII. By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benét

The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods -- this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons -- it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden -- they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.

My father is a priest; I am the son of a priest. I have been in the Dead Places near us, with my father -- at first, I was afraid. When my father went into the house to search for the metal, I stood by the door and my heart felt small and weak. It was a dead man's house, a spirit house. It did not have the smell of man, though there were old bones in a corner. But it is not fitting that a priest's son should show fear. I looked at the bones in the shadow and kept my voice still.

Then my father came out with the metal -- good, strong piece. He looked at me with both eyes but I had not run away. He gave me the metal to hold -- I took it and did not die. So he knew that I was truly his son and would be a priest in my time. That was when I was very young -- nevertheless, my brothers would not have done it, though they are good hunters. After that, they gave me the good piece of meat and the warm corner of the fire. My father watched over me -- he was glad that I should be a priest. But when I boasted or wept without a reason, he punished me more strictly than my brothers. That was right.

After a time, I myself was allowed to go into the dead houses and search for metal. So I learned the ways of those houses -- and if I saw bones, I was no longer afraid. The bones are light and old -- sometimes they will fall into dust if you touch them. But that is a great sin.

I was taught the chants and the spells -- l was taught how to stop the running of blood from a wound and many secrets. A priest must know many secrets -- that was what my father said.
If the hunters think we do all things by chants and spells, they may believe so -- it does not hurt them. I was taught how to read in the old books and how to make the old writings -- that was hard and took a long time. My knowledge made me happy -- it was like a fire in my heart. Most of all, I liked to hear of the Old Days and the stories of the gods. I asked myself many questions that I could not answer, but it was good to ask them. At night, I would lie awake and listen to the wind -- it seemed to me that it was the voice of the gods as they flew through the air.

We are not ignorant like the Forest People -- our women spin wool on the wheel, our priests wear a white robe. We do not eat grubs from the trees, we have not forgotten the old writings, although they are hard to understand. Nevertheless, my knowledge and my lack of knowledge burned in me -- I wished to know more. When I was a man at last, I came to my father and said, "It is time for me to go on my journey. Give me your leave."
He looked at me for a long time, stroking his beard, then he said at last, "Yes. It is time." That night, in the house of the priesthood, I asked for and received purification. My body hurt but my spirit was a cool stone. It was my father himself who questioned me about my dreams.

He bade me look into the smoke of the fire and see -- I saw and told what I saw. It was what I have always seen -- a river, and, beyond it, a great Dead Place and in it the gods walking. I have always thought about that. His eyes were stern when I told him he was no longer my father but a priest. He said, "This is a strong dream."
"It is mine," I said, while the smoke waved and my head felt light. They were singing the Star song in the outer chamber and it was like the buzzing of bees in my head.
He asked me how the gods were dressed and I told him how they were dressed. We know how they were dressed from the book, but I saw them as if they were before me. When I had finished, he threw the sticks three times and studied them as they fell.

"This is a very strong dream," he said." It may eat you up."

"I am not afraid," I said and looked at him with both eyes. My voice sounded thin in my ears but that was because of the smoke.

He touched me on the breast and the forehead. He gave me the bow and the three arrows.
"Take them," he said. "It is forbidden to travel east. It is forbidden to cross the river. It is forbidden to go to the Place of the Gods. All these things are forbidden. "

"All these things are forbidden," I said, but it was my voice that spoke and not my spirit. He looked at me again.

"My son," he said. "Once I had young dreams. If your dreams do not eat you up, you may be a great priest. If they eat you, you are still my son. Now go on your journey."

I went fasting, as is the law. My body hurt but not my heart. When the dawn came, I was out of sight of the village. I prayed and purified myself, waiting for a sign. The sign was an eagle. It flew east.

Sometimes signs are sent by bad spirits. I waited again on the flat rock, fasting, taking no food. I was very still -- I could feel the sky above me and the earth beneath. I waited till the sun was beginning to sink. Then three deer passed in the valley going east -- they did not mind me or see me. There was a white fawn with them -- a very great sign.

I followed them, at a distance, waiting for what would happen. My heart was troubled about going east, yet I knew that I must go. My head hummed with my fasting -- I did not even see the panther spring upon the white fawn. But, before I knew it, the bow was in my hand. I shouted and the panther lifted his head from the fawn. It is not easy to kill a panther with one arrow but the arrow went through his eye and into his brain. He died as he tried to spring -- he rolled over, tearing at the ground. Then I knew I was meant to go east -- I knew that was my journey. When the night came, I made my fire and roasted meat.

It is eight suns' journey to the east and a man passes by many Dead Places. The Forest People are afraid of them but I am not. Once I made my fire on the edge of a Dead Place at night and, next morning, in the dead house, I found a good knife, little rusted. That was small to what came afterward but it made my heart feel big. Always when I looked for game, it was in front of my arrow, and twice I passed hunting parties of the Forest People without their knowing. So I knew my magic was strong and my journey clean, in spite of the law.

Toward the setting of the eighth sun, I came to the banks of the great river. It was half-a-day's journey after I had left the god-road -- we do not use the god-roads now for they are falling apart into great blocks of stone, and the forest is safer going. A long way off, I had seen the water through trees but the trees were thick. At last, I came out upon an open place at the top of a cliff. There was the great river below, like a giant in the sun. It is very long, very wide. It could eat all the streams we know and still be thirsty. Its name is Ou-dis-sun, the Sacred, the Long. No man of my tribe had seen it, not even my father, the priest. It was magic and I prayed.
Then I raised my eyes and looked south. It was there, the Place of the Gods.

How can I tell what it was like -- you do not know. It was there, in the red light, and they were too big to be houses. It was there with the red light upon it, mighty and ruined. I knew that in another moment the gods would see me. I covered my eyes with my hands and crept back into the forest.

Surely, that was enough to do, and live. Surely it was enough to spend the night upon the cliff. The Forest People themselves do not come near. Yet, all through the night, I knew that I should have to cross the river and walk in the places of the gods, although the gods ate me up. My magic did not help me at all and yet there was a fire in my bowels, a fire in my mind. When the sun rose, I thought, "My journey has been clean. Now I will go home from my journey." But, even as I thought so, I knew I could not. If I went to the Place of the Gods, I would surely die, but, if I did not go, I could never be at peace with my spirit again. It is better to lose one's life than one's spirit, if one is a priest and the son of a priest.

Nevertheless, as I made the raft, the tears ran out of my eyes. The Forest People could have killed me without fight, if they had come upon me then, but they did not come.

When the raft was made, I said the sayings for the dead and painted myself for death. My heart was cold as a frog and my knees like water, but the burning in my mind would not let me have peace. As I pushed the raft from the shore, I began my death song -- I had the right. It was a fine song.

"I am John, son of John," I sang. "My people are the Hill People. They are the men.
I go into the Dead Places but I am not slain.
I take the metal from the Dead Places but I am not blasted.
I travel upon the god-roads and am not afraid. E-yah! I have killed the panther, I have killed the fawn!
E-yah! I have come to the great river. No man has come there before.
It is forbidden to go east, but I have gone, forbidden to go on the great river, but I am there.
Open your hearts, you spirits, and hear my song.
Now I go to the Place of the Gods, I shall not return.
My body is painted for death and my limbs weak, but my heart is big as I go to the Place of the Gods!"

All the same, when I came to the Place of the Gods, I was afraid, afraid. The current of the great river is very strong -- it gripped my raft with its hands. That was magic, for the river itself is wide and calm. I could feel evil spirits about me, I was swept down the stream. Never have I been so much alone -- I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird -- alone upon the great river, the servant of the gods.

Yet, after a while, my eyes were opened and I saw. I saw both banks of the river -- I saw that once there had been god-roads across it, though now they were broken and fallen like broken vines. Very great they were, and wonderful and broken -- broken in the time of the Great Burning when the fire fell out of the sky. And always the current took me nearer to the Place of the Gods, and the huge ruins rose before my eyes.

I do not know the customs of rivers -- we are the People of the Hills. I tried to guide my raft with the pole but it spun around. I thought the river meant to take me past the Place of the Gods and out into the Bitter Water of the legends. I grew angry then -- my heart felt strong. I said aloud, "I am a priest and the son of a priest!" The gods heard me -- they showed me how to paddle with the pole on one side of the raft. The current changed itself -- I drew near to the Place of the Gods.

When I was very near, my raft struck and turned over. I can swim in our lakes -- I swam to the shore. There was a great spike of rusted metal sticking out into the river -- I hauled myself up upon it and sat there, panting. I had saved my bow and two arrows and the knife I found in the Dead Place but that was all. My raft went whirling downstream toward the Bitter Water. I looked after it, and thought if it had trod me under, at least I would be safely dead. Nevertheless, when I had dried my bowstring and re-strung it, I walked forward to the Place of the Gods.

It felt like ground underfoot; it did not burn me. It is not true what some of the tales say, that the ground there burns forever, for I have been there. Here and there were the marks and stains of the Great Burning, on the ruins, that is true. But they were old marks and old stains. It is not true either, what some of our priests say, that it is an island covered with fogs and enchantments. It is not. It is a great Dead Place -- greater than any Dead Place we know. Everywhere in it there are god-roads, though most are cracked and broken. Everywhere there are the ruins of the high towers of the gods.

How shall I tell what I saw? I went carefully, my strung bow in my hand, my skin ready for danger. There should have been the wailings of spirits and the shrieks of demons, but there were not. It was very silent and sunny where I had landed -- the wind and the rain and the birds that drop seeds had done their work -- the grass grew in the cracks of the broken stone. It is a fair island -- no wonder the gods built there. If I had come there, a god, I also would have built.

How shall I tell what I saw? The towers are not all broken -- here and there one still stands, like a great tree in a forest, and the birds nest high. But the towers themselves look blind, for the gods are gone. I saw a fishhawk, catching fish in the river. I saw a little dance of white butterflies over a great heap of broken stones and columns. I went there and looked about me -- there was a carved stone with cut -- letters, broken in half. I can read letters but I could not understand these. They said UBTREAS. There was also the shattered image of a man or a god. It had been made of white stone and he wore his hair tied back like a woman's. His name was ASHING, as I read on the cracked half of a stone. I thought it wise to pray to ASHING, though I do not know that god.
How shall I tell what I saw? There was no smell of man left, on stone or metal. Nor were there many trees in that wilderness of stone. There are many pigeons, nesting and dropping in the towers -- the gods must have loved them, or, perhaps, they used them for sacrifices. There are wild cats that roam the god-roads, green-eyed, unafraid of man. At night they wail like demons but they are not demons. The wild dogs are more dangerous, for they hunt in a pack, but them I did not meet till later. Everywhere there are the carved stones, carved with magical numbers or words.

I went north -- I did not try to hide myself. When a god or a demon saw me, then I would die, but meanwhile I was no longer afraid. My hunger for knowledge burned in me -- there was so much that I could not understand. After a while, I knew that my belly was hungry. I could have hunted for my meat, but I did not hunt. It is known that the gods did not hunt as we do -- they got their food from enchanted boxes and jars. Sometimes these are still found in the Dead Places -- once, when I was a child and foolish, I opened such a jar and tasted it and found the food sweet. But my father found out and punished me for it strictly, for, often, that food is death. Now, though, I had long gone past what was forbidden, and I entered the likeliest towers, looking for the food of the gods.

I found it at last in the ruins of a great temple in the mid-city. A mighty temple it must have been, for the roof was painted like the sky at night with its stars -- that much I could see, though the colors were faint and dim. It went down into great caves and tunnels -- perhaps they kept their slaves there. But when I started to climb down, I heard the squeaking of rats, so I did not go -- rats are unclean, and there must have been many tribes of them, from the squeaking. But near there, I found food, in the heart of a ruin, behind a door that still opened. I ate only the fruits from the jars -- they had a very sweet taste. There was drink, too, in bottles of glass -- the drink of the gods was strong and made my head swim. After I had eaten and drunk, I slept on the top of a stone, my bow at my side.

When I woke, the sun was low. Looking down from where I lay, I saw a dog sitting on his haunches. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth; he looked as if he were laughing. He was a big dog, with a gray-brown coat, as big as a wolf. I sprang up and shouted at him but he did not move -- he just sat there as if he were laughing. I did not like that. When I reached for a stone to throw, he moved swiftly out of the way of the stone. He was not afraid of me; he looked at me as if I were meat. No doubt I could have killed him with an arrow, but I did not know if there were others. Moreover, night was falling.

I looked about me -- not far away there was a great, broken god-road, leading north. The towers were high enough, but not so high, and while many of the dead-houses were wrecked, there were some that stood. I went toward this god-road, keeping to the heights of the ruins, while the dog followed. When I had reached the god-road, I saw that there were others behind him. If I had slept later, they would have come upon me asleep and torn out my throat. As it was, they were sure enough of me; they did not hurry. When I went into the dead-house, they kept watch at the entrance -- doubtless they thought they would have a fine hunt. But a dog cannot open a door and I knew, from the books, that the gods did not like to live on the ground but on high.

I had just found a door I could open when the dogs decided to rush. Ha! They were surprised when I shut the door in their faces -- it was a good door, of strong metal. I could hear their foolish baying beyond it but I did not stop to answer them. I was in darkness -- I found stairs and climbed. There were many stairs, turning around till my head was dizzy. At the top was another door -- I found the knob and opened it. I was in a long small chamber -- on one side of it was a bronze door that could not be opened, for it had no handle. Perhaps there was a magic word to open it but I did not have the word. I turned to the door in the opposite side of the wall. The lock of it was broken and I opened it and went in.

Within, there was a place of great riches. The god who lived there must have been a powerful god. The first room was a small ante-room -- I waited there for some time, telling the spirits of the place that I came in peace and not as a robber. When it seemed to me that they had had time to hear me, I went on. Ah, what riches! Few, even, of the windows had been broken -- it was all as it had been. The great windows that looked over the city had not been broken at all though they were dusty and streaked with many years. There were coverings on the floors, the colors not greatly faded, and the chairs were soft and deep. There were pictures upon the walls, very strange, very wonderful -- I remember one of a bunch of flowers in a jar -- if you came close to it, you could see nothing but bits of color, but if you stood away from it, the flowers might have been picked yesterday. It made my heart feel strange to look at this picture -- and to look at the figure of a bird, in some hard clay, on a table and see it so like our birds. Everywhere there were books and writings, many in tongues that I could not read. The god who lived there must have been a wise god and full of knowledge. I felt I had a right there, as I sought knowledge also.

Nevertheless, it was strange. There was a washing-place but no water -- perhaps the gods washed in air. There was a cooking-place but no wood, and though there was a machine to cook food, there was no place to put fire in it. Nor were there candles or lamps -- there were things that looked like lamps but they had neither oil nor wick. All these things were magic, but I touched them and lived -- the magic had gone out of them. Let me tell one thing to show. In the washing-place, a thing said "Hot" but it was not hot to the touch -- another thing said "Cold" but it was not cold. This must have been a strong magic but the magic was gone. I do not understand -- they had ways -- I wish that I knew.

It was close and dry and dusty in the house of the gods. I have said the magic was gone but that is not true -- it had gone from the magic things but it had not gone from the place. I felt the spirits about me, weighing upon me. Nor had I ever slept in a Dead Place before -- and yet, tonight, I must sleep there. When I thought of it, my tongue felt dry in my throat, in spite of my wish for knowledge. Almost I would have gone down again and faced the dogs, but I did not.

I had not gone through all the rooms when the darkness fell. When it fell, I went back to the big room looking over the city and made fire. There was a place to make fire and a box with wood in it, though I do not think they cooked there. I wrapped myself in a floor-covering and slept in front of the fire -- I was very tired.
Now I tell what is very strong magic. I woke in the midst of the night. When I woke, the fire had gone out and I was cold. It seemed to me that all around me there were whisperings and voices. I closed my eyes to shut them out. Some will say that I slept again, but I do not think that I slept. I could feel the spirits drawing my spirit out of my body as a fish is drawn on a line.

Why should I lie about it? I am a priest and the son of a priest. If there are spirits, as they say, in the small Dead Places near us, what spirits must there not be in that great Place of the Gods? And would not they wish to speak? After such long years? I know that I felt myself drawn as a fish is drawn on a line. I had stepped out of my body -- I could see my body asleep in front of the cold fire, but it was not I. I was drawn to look out upon the city of the gods.

It should have been dark, for it was night, but it was not dark. Everywhere there were lights -- lines of light -- circles and blurs of light -- ten thousand torches would not have been the same. The sky itself was alight -- you could barely see the stars for the glow in the sky. I thought to myself "This is strong magic" and trembled. There was a roaring in my ears like the rushing of rivers. Then my eyes grew used to the light and my ears to the sound. I knew that I was seeing the city as it had been when the gods were alive.

That was a sight indeed -- yes, that was a sight: I could not have seen it in the body -- my body would have died. Everywhere went the gods, on foot and in chariots -- there were gods beyond number and counting and their chariots blocked the streets. They had turned night to day for their pleasure-they did not sleep with the sun. The noise of their coming and going was the noise of the many waters. It was magic what they could do -- it was magic what they did.

I looked out of another window -- the great vines of their bridges were mended and god-roads went east and west. Restless, restless, were the gods and always in motion! They burrowed tunnels under rivers -- they flew in the air. With unbelievable tools they did giant works -- no part of the earth was safe from them, for, if they wished for a thing, they summoned it from the other side of the world. And always, as they labored and rested, as they feasted and made love, there was a drum in their ears -- the pulse of the giant city, beating and beating like a man's heart.

Were they happy? What is happiness to the gods? They were great, they were mighty, they were wonderful and terrible. As I looked upon them and their magic, I felt like a child -- but a little more, it seemed to me, and they would pull down the moon from the sky. I saw them with wisdom beyond wisdom and knowledge beyond knowledge. And yet not all they did was well done -- even I could see that – and yet their wisdom could not but grow until all was peace.

Then I saw their fate come upon them and that was terrible past speech. It came upon them as they walked the streets of their city. I have been in the fights with the Forest People -- I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets of their city -- poor gods, poor gods! Then the towers began to fall. A few escaped -- yes, a few. The legends tell it. But, even after the city had become a Dead Place, for many years the poison was still in the ground. I saw it happen, I saw the last of them die. It was darkness over the broken city and I wept.

All this, I saw. I saw it as I have told it, though not in the body. When I woke in the morning, I was hungry, but I did not think first of my hunger for my heart was perplexed and confused. I knew the reason for the Dead Places but I did not see why it had happened. It seemed to me it should not have happened, with all the magic they had. I went through the house looking for an answer. There was so much in the house I could not understand -- and yet I am a priest and the son of a priest. It was like being on one side of the great river, at night, with no light to show the way.

Then I saw the dead god. He was sitting in his chair, by the window, in a room I had not entered before and, for the first moment, I thought that he was alive. Then I saw the skin on the back of his hand -- it was like dry leather. The room was shut, hot and dry -- no doubt that had kept him as he was. At first I was afraid to approach him -- then the fear left me. He was sitting looking out over the city -- he was dressed in the clothes of the gods. His age was neither young nor old -- I could not tell his age. But there was wisdom in his face and great sadness. You could see that he would have not run away. He had sat at his window, watching his city die -- then he himself had died. But it is better to lose one's life than one's spirit -- and you could see from the face that his spirit had not been lost. I knew, that, if I touched him, he would fall into dust -- and yet, there was something unconquered in the face.


That is all of my story, for then I knew he was a man -- I knew then that they had been men, neither gods nor demons. It is a great knowledge, hard to tell and believe. They were men -- they went a dark road, but they were men. I had no fear after that -- I had no fear going home, though twice I fought off the dogs and once I was hunted for two days by the Forest People. When I saw my father again, I prayed and was purified. He touched my lips and my breast, he said, "You went away a boy. You come back a man and a priest." I said, "Father, they were men! I have been in the Place of the Gods and seen it! Now slay me, if it is the law -- but still I know they were men."

He looked at me out of both eyes. He said, "The law is not always the same shape -- you have done what you have done. I could not have done it my time, but you come after me. Tell!"

I told and he listened. After that, I wished to tell all the people but he showed me otherwise. He said, "Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead Places." He was right -- it is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.

Nevertheless, we make a beginning. it is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now -- there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken -- but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods -- the place newyork -- not one man but a company. We shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others -- the gods Lincoln and Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.

[Siblesz]

XIV. Requiem for the Morrow by Juan Andres Siblesz

The fluorescent lights followed me across the corridor as my feet rhythmically paced on and off of each block on the ceramic floor. Dozens seemed like hundreds as I maneuvered through the savage crowd and focused my attention on the other end of the hall. There it lay… my way out of the unnerving prism. My steps grew louder and my stroll quicker as I battled through the cluster. A monotonous mass of people obstructed my struggle for freedom. Their voices of deception and superficial emotion pervaded the room with acute displeasure. My gaze was fixed upon the exit as I bumped and stumbled across the obstacles that intermeddled in my course. I saw my destination through the glass doors and hurried to it. Trees and life abounded in the outside. I was near the end of the fight, readying my palms to unscrew the metallic knob and rid myself from my surroundings. My head reached a pinnacle of disturbance as I took hold of the door. I opened it with effort and slid my body through its evanescent crack.

I broke loose. As I stepped outside, I breathed the unadulterated air in a fit of ecstasy, letting the stress wither and subside into forgetfulness. The sunlight reflected on my face as it lit the beautiful Florida winter sky in its blue and transparent clarity. Not a cloud could be seen. The wind gave life to the trees as branches musically stroked each other in perfect unison. My eyes wandered about in peaceful apprehension as nature soothed my senses. I walked across the lane, routinely directing my attention to my succeeding purpose. Suddenly, I stopped as I heard the distinct and lovely chirp of a bird. With its beautifully colored feathers and smooth beak, the bird sang its soul to its alma mater. I focused on its motions and studied its grace with curiosity.

All at once, I became one with the cosmos and my spirit blissfully reconnected to its origins. From the smell of the grass to the movement of the wind, and from the branches of the trees to the animals that inhabited it, nature seemed to come together in coordinated harmony. I felt alive and at home once again. Standing motionless and in a state of enlightenment, I remained in passive contemplation and appreciation. The reality of our human condition personified itself in my mind, and all at once, I understood everything. With our commercial contraptions, our concrete-paved avenues, and our iron-clad skyscrapers, we had managed to rid ourselves of that which made us human in the first place. Our souls fled our bodies as we sought refuge in artificial habitats. The environment that humanity had created for itself was not natural. But on that sunny afternoon, what I was witnessing was natural and real. It was my true home. It was our true home.

From Lucy to Cro-Magnon, our prototypes lived in the untamed premises of the world as they struggled for survival. But as our minds developed, we began to adapt the harsh environment of the planet to our way of life. Civilization sparked progressively after our evolution into modern man, but while our strides in culture and technological advances succeeded in providing our kind with heightened levels of comfort and extended life-spans, our nature and spirit were suppressed by the very same limitations that enabled us to advance into such a position in the first place. We had not only tamed our environment, but had tamed ourselves.

As the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia was settled with the effort of our ancestral hands, our minds curtailed our desires as society placed laws and ethics in order to limit our animal behavior. With Moses’ Ten Commandments and Hammurabi’s code, formal law and order were established. Rome’s laws of the Twelve Tables further extended the state’s control over the human mind, and documents such as the American Constitution would follow suit over time. In the present, we find ourselves controlled by an intricate network of crime and punishment in which abstract ideals manipulate our emotions and instincts by keeping them suppressed from our own selves. We have evolved from apes in the African savannahs, to tamed apes in concrete jungles.

As modernization expands worldwide, we should ask how to mend our past with our future, and how to avoid compromising our soul with our comfort in order to restore and ensure the essence of our human nature for posterity. As I see our spirit tarnished and our nature oppressed, I lament for the fall of man. It is difficult to mourn over what has happened in the past, and harder yet to mourn for the passing away of the here and now, but it is an arduous and torturous trial to mourn for that which has not yet occurred, but will surely do so in the future. The requiems of the past are accepted and forgotten, those of the present are shared and comforted, but the inevitable failures of the future seem too distant for man to contemplate and comprehend. We are narcissistic creatures, thinking only of what matters today, forgetting what occurred yesterday, and ignoring what will happen tomorrow.

After experiencing this epiphany, my conscience reversed to its original state, and I retired my attention from the bird as quickly as I had first seen it. I then took one last look at my surroundings, sighed in frustration, and turned round to continue on with my routine. I opened the door, went inside into the corridor, and restarted the perpetual cycle from whence I had begun.

[Siblesz]

XV.The Thing Called Love--Be on Your Guard by Lucretius

This, then, is what we term Venus. This is the origin of the thing called
love--that drop of Venus' honey that first drips into our heart, to be
followed by numbing heartache. Though the object of your love may be absent,
images of it still haunt you and the beloved name chimes sweetly in your ears.
If you find yourself thus passionately enamoured of an individual, you should
keep well away from such images. Thrust from you anything that might feed your
passion, and turn your mind elsewhere. Vent the seed of love upon other
objects[in Nietezchean terms: Sublimate. By clinging to it you assure
yourself the certainty of heartsickness and pain....

This is the one thing of which the more we have, the more our breast burns
with the evil lust of having. Food and fluid are taken into our body: since
they can fill their alloted places, the desire for meat and drink is thus
easily appeased. But a pretty face or a pleasing complexion gives the body
nothing to enjoy but insubstantial imagies, which all too often fond hope
scatters to the winds.

When a thirsty man tries to drink in his dreams but is given no drop to
quench the fire in his limbs, he clutches at images of water with fruitless
effort and while he laps up a rushing stream he remains thirsty in the midst.
Just so in the midst of love Venus teases lovers with images. They cannot
glut their eyes by gazing on the beloved form, however closely. Their hands
glean nothing from those dainty limbs in their aimless roving over all the
body. Then comes the moment when with limbs entwined they pluck the flower of
youth. Their bodies thrill with the presentiment of joy, and it is seed-time
in the fields of Venus. Body clings greedily to body; moist lips are pressed
on lips, and deep breaths are drawn through clenched teeth. But all to no
purpose. One can glean nothing from the other, nor enter in and be wholly
absorbed, body in body; for sometimes it seems that that is what they are
craving and striving to do, so hungrily do they cling together in Venus'
fetters, while their limbs are unnerved and liquefied by the intensity of
rapture. At length, when the spate of lust is spent, ther comes a slight
intermission in the raging fever. But not for long. Soon the same frenzy
returns. The fit is upon them once more. They ask themselves what it is they
are craving for, but find no device that will master their malady. In aimless
bewilderment they waste away, stricken by an unseen wound.

Add to this that they spend their strength and fail under strain. Their
days are passed at the mercy of another's whim. Their wealth slips from
them, transmuted to Babylonian brocades. Their duties are neglected. Their
reputation totters and goes into a decline. It is all very well for dainty
feet to sparkle with gay slippers of Sicyon; for settings of gold to enclasp
huge emeralds aglow with green fire, and sea-tinted garments to suffer the
constant wear and stain of Venus. A hard-won patrimony is metamorphosed into
bonnets and tiaras or, it may be, into Grecian robes, masterpieces from the
looms of Elis or of Ceos. No matter how lavish the decor and the
cuisine--drinking parties (with no lack of drinks), entertainments, perfumes,
garlands, festoons and all--they are still to no purpose. From the very heart
of the fountain of delight there rises a jet of bitterness that poisons the
fragrance of the flowers. Perhaps the unforgetting mind frets itself
remorsefully with the thought of life's best years squandered in sloth and
debauchery. Perhaps the beloved has let fly some two-edged word, which lodges
in the impassioned heart and glows there like a living flame. Perhaps he
thinks she is rolling her eyes too freely and turning them upon another, or he
catches in her face a hint of mockery.

And these are the evils inherent in love that prospers and fulfills its
hopes. In starved and thwarted love the evils you can see plainly without even
opening your eyes past all counting. How much better to be on your guard
beforehand, as I have advised, and take care that you are not enmeshed![If
only you would have followed your advice to us yourself, Lucretius. If only
you had succeeded in doing what you claim that we do! But you did not,
appearantly, for whence did the roots of this understanding of the "evils
inherent in love" originate if not from...you know what I mean?]

To avoid enticement into the snares of love is not so difficult as, once
entrapped, to escape out of the toils and snap the tenacious knots of Venus.
And yet, be you never so tightly entangled and embrangled, you can still free
yourself from the curse unless you stand in the way of your own freedom.
First, you should concentrate on all the faults of mind or body of her whom
you covet and sigh for[exactly!]. For men often behave as though blinded by
love and credit the beloved whith charms to which she has no valid title. How
often do we see blemished and unsightly women basking in a lover's adoration!
One man scoffs at another and urges him to propitate Venus because he is the
victim of such a degrading passion; yet as like as not the poor devil is
in the same unahppy plight himself, all unaware. A sallow wench is acclaimed
as a nut-brown maid. A sluttish slattern is admired for her "sweet disorder."
Her eyes are never green, but grey as Athene's. If she is stringy and woody,
she is lithe as a gazelle. A stunted runt is a sprite, a sheer delight from
top to toe. A clumsy giantess is "a daughter of the gods divinely tall." She
has an impediment in her speech--a charming lisp, of course. She's as mute as
a stockfish--what modesty! A waspish, fiery-tempered scold--she "burns with a
gem-like flame." She becomes "svelte" and "willowy" when she is almost too
skinny to live; "delicate" when she is hald-dead with coughing. Her breasts
are swollen and protuberant: she is "Ceres suckling Bacchus." Her nose is
snub--"a Faun," then, or "a child of the Satyrs." Her lips bulge: she is "all
kiss." It would be wearisome task to run through the whole catalogue. But
suppose her face in fact is all that could be desired and the charm of Venus
radiates from her whole body. Even so, there are still others. Even so, we
lived without her before. Even so, in her physical nature she is no different,
as we well know, from the plainest of her sex. She is driven to use
foul-smelling fumigants. Her maids keep well away from her and snigger behind
her back. The tearful lover, shut out from the presence, heaps the threshold
with flowers and garlands, anoints the disdainful doorposts with perfume, and
plants rueful kisses on the door. Often enough, were he admitted, one wiff
would promptly make him cast around for some decent pretext to take his leave.
His fond complaint, long-pondered and farfetched, would fall dismally flat. He
would curse himself for a fool to have endowed her with qualities above the
mortal imperfection.

To the daughters of Venus themselves this is no secret. Hence they are at
pains to hide all the back-stage activities of life from those whom they wish
to keep fast bound in the bonds of love. But their pains are wasted, since
your mind has power to drag all these mysteries into the daylight and get at
truth behind the sniggers.

[Siblesz]

XVI.The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chapter 4

"... Do you know, Alyosha -- don't laugh I made a poem about a year ago. If you can waste another ten minutes on me, I'll tell it to you."

"You wrote a poem?"

"Oh, no, I didn't write it," laughed Ivan, and I've never written two lines of poetry in my life. But I made up this poem in prose and I remembered it. I was carried away when I made it up. You will be my first reader -- that is listener. Why should an author forego even one listener?" smiled Ivan. "Shall I tell it to you?"

"I am all attention." said Alyosha.

"My poem is called The Grand Inquisitor; it's a ridiculous thing, but I want to tell it to you.


Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor

"EVEN this must have a preface -- that is, a literary preface," laughed Ivan, "and I am a poor hand at making one. You see, my action takes place in the sixteenth century, and at that time, as you probably learnt at school, it was customary in poetry to bring down heavenly powers on earth. Not to speak of Dante, in France, clerks, as well as the monks in the monasteries, used to give regular performances in which the Madonna, the saints, the angels, Christ, and God Himself were brought on the stage. In those days it was done in all simplicity. In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris an edifying and gratuitous spectacle was provided for the people in the Hotel de Ville of Paris in the reign of Louis XI in honour of the birth of the dauphin. It was called Le bon jugement de la tres sainte et gracieuse Vierge Marie, and she appears herself on the stage and pronounces her bon jugement. Similar plays, chiefly from the Old Testament, were occasionally performed in Moscow too, up to the times of Peter the Great. But besides plays there were all sorts of legends and ballads scattered about the world, in which the saints and angels and all the powers of Heaven took part when required. In our monasteries the monks busied themselves in translating, copying, and even composing such poems- and even under the Tatars. There is, for instance, one such poem (of course, from the Greek), The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell, with descriptions as bold as Dante's. Our Lady visits hell, and the Archangel Michael leads her through the torments. She sees the sinners and their punishment. There she sees among others one noteworthy set of sinners in a burning lake; some of them sink to the bottom of the lake so that they can't swim out, and 'these God forgets'- an expression of extraordinary depth and force. And so Our Lady, shocked and weeping, falls before the throne of God and begs for mercy for all in hell- for all she has seen there, indiscriminately. Her conversation with God is immensely interesting. She beseeches Him, she will not desist, and when God points to the hands and feet of her Son, nailed to the Cross, and asks, 'How can I forgive His tormentors?' she bids all the saints, all the martyrs, all the angels and archangels to fall down with her and pray for mercy on all without distinction. It ends by her winning from God a respite of suffering every year from Good Friday till Trinity Day, and the sinners at once raise a cry of thankfulness from hell, chanting, 'Thou art just, O Lord, in this judgment.' Well, my poem would have been of that kind if it had appeared at that time. He comes on the scene in my poem, but He says nothing, only appears and passes on. Fifteen centuries have passed since He promised to come in His glory, fifteen centuries since His prophet wrote, 'Behold, I come quickly'; 'Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, neither the Son, but the Father,' as He Himself predicted on earth. But humanity awaits him with the same faith and with the same love. Oh, with greater faith, for it is fifteen centuries since man has ceased to see signs from heaven.

No signs from heaven come to-day
To add to what the heart doth say.

There was nothing left but faith in what the heart doth say. It is true there were many miracles in those days. There were saints who performed miraculous cures; some holy people, according to their biographies, were visited by the Queen of Heaven herself. But the devil did not slumber, and doubts were already arising among men of the truth of these miracles. And just then there appeared in the north of Germany a terrible new heresy. 'A huge star like to a torch' (that is, to a church) 'fell on the sources of the waters and they became bitter.' These heretics began blasphemously denying miracles. But those who remained faithful were all the more ardent in their faith. The tears of humanity rose up to Him as before, awaited His coming, loved Him, hoped for Him, yearned to suffer and die for Him as before. And so many ages mankind had prayed with faith and fervour, 'O Lord our God, hasten Thy coming'; so many ages called upon Him, that in His infinite mercy He deigned to come down to His servants. Before that day He had come down, He had visited some holy men, martyrs, and hermits, as is written in their lives. Among us, Tyutchev, with absolute faith in the truth of his words, bore witness that

Bearing the Cross, in slavish dress,
Weary and worn, the Heavenly King
Our mother, Russia, came to bless,
And through our land went wandering.

And that certainly was so, I assure you.

"And behold, He deigned to appear for a moment to the people, to the tortured, suffering people, sunk in iniquity, but loving Him like children. My story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God, and 'in the splendid auto da fe the wicked heretics were burnt.' Oh, of course, this was not the coming in which He will appear, according to His promise, at the end of time in all His heavenly glory, and which will be sudden 'as lightning flashing from east to west.' No, He visited His children only for a moment, and there where the flames were crackling round the heretics. In His infinite mercy He came once more among men in that human shape in which He walked among men for thirty-three years fifteen centuries ago. He came down to the 'hot pavements' of the southern town in which on the day before almost a hundred heretics had, ad majorem gloriam Dei, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent auto da fe, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population of Seville.

"He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognised Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they recognised Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His heart, and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from childhood, cries out, 'O Lord, heal me and I shall see Thee!' and, as it were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd weeps and kisses the earth under His feet. Children throw flowers before Him, sing, and cry hosannah. 'It is He- it is He!' repeat. 'It must be He, it can be no one but Him!' He stops at the steps of the Seville cathedral at the moment when the weeping mourners are bringing in a little open white coffin. In it lies a child of seven, the only daughter of a prominent citizen. The dead child lies hidden in flowers. 'He will raise your child,' the crowd shouts to the weeping mother. The priest, coming to meet the coffin, looks perplexed, and frowns, but the mother of the dead child throws herself at His feet with a wail. 'If it is Thou, raise my child!' she cries, holding out her hands to Him. The procession halts, the coffin is laid on the steps at His feet. He looks with compassion, and His lips once more softly pronounce, 'Maiden, arise!' and the maiden arises. The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide-open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in her hand.

"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church -- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.

"'Is it Thou? Thou?' but receiving no answer, he adds at once. 'Don't answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost thou know what will be to-morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,' he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner."

"I don't quite understand, Ivan. What does it mean?" Alyosha, who had been listening in silence, said with a smile. "Is it simply a wild fantasy, or a mistake on the part of the old man -- some impossible quid pro quo?"

"Take it as the last," said Ivan, laughing, "if you are so corrupted by modern realism and can't stand anything fantastic. If you like it to be a case of mistaken identity, let it be so. It is true," he went on, laughing, "the old man was ninety, and he might well be crazy over his set idea. He might have been struck by the appearance of the Prisoner. It might, in fact, be simply his ravings, the delusion of an old man of ninety, over -- excited by the auto da fe of a hundred heretics the day before. But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should speak out, that he should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for ninety years."

"And the Prisoner too is silent? Does He look at him and not say a word?"

"That's inevitable in any case," Ivan laughed again. "The old man has told Him He hasn't the right to add anything to what He has said of old. One may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least. 'All has been given by Thee to the Pope,' they say, 'and all, therefore, is still in the Pope's hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.' That's how they speak and write too -- the Jesuits, at any rate. I have read it myself in the works of their theologians. 'Hast Thou the right to reveal to us one of the mysteries of that world from which Thou hast come?' my old man asks Him, and answers the question for Him. 'No, Thou hast not; that Thou mayest not add to what has been said of old, and mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast on earth. Whatsoever Thou revealest anew will encroach on men's freedom of faith; for it will be manifest as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was dearer to Thee than anything in those days fifteen hundred years ago. Didst Thou not often say then, "I will make you free"? But now Thou hast seen these "free" men,' the old man adds suddenly, with a pensive smile. 'Yes, we've paid dearly for it,' he goes on, looking sternly at Him, 'but at last we have completed that work in Thy name. For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it's over for good? Thou lookest meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell Thee that now, to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what Thou didst? Was this Thy freedom?'"

"I don't understand again." Alyosha broke in. "Is he ironical, is he jesting?"

"Not a bit of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy. 'For now' (he is speaking of the Inquisition, of course) 'for the first time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy? Thou wast warned,' he says to Him. 'Thou hast had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou didst not listen to those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be made happy. But, fortunately, departing Thou didst hand on the work to us. Thou hast promised, Thou hast established by Thy word, Thou hast given to us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou canst not think of taking it away. Why, then, hast Thou come to hinder us?'"

"And what's the meaning of 'no lack of admonitions and warnings'?" asked Alyosha.

"Why, that's the chief part of what the old man must say.

"'The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence,' the old man goes on, great spirit talked with Thee in the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he "tempted" Thee. Is that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to Thee in three questions and what Thou didst reject, and what in the books is called "the temptation"? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three temptations. The statement of those three questions was itself the miracle. If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books, and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew, and to do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth -- rulers, chief priests, learned men, philosophers, poets- and had set them the task to invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of the world and of humanity- dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal. For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature. At the time it could not be so clear, since the future was unknown; but now that fifteen hundred years have passed, we see that everything in those three questions was so justly divined and foretold, and has been so truly fulfilled, that nothing can be added to them or taken from them.

"Judge Thyself who was right -- Thou or he who questioned Thee then? Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this:

"Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread -- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread." But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, "Who can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!" Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" that's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished, yet Thou mightest have prevented that new tower and have cut short the sufferings of men for a thousand years; for they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, "Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!" And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them -- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.

"'This is the significance of the first question in the wilderness, and this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great secret of this world. Choosing "bread," Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity -- to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!" And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone- the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven. Behold what Thou didst further. And all again in the name of freedom! I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread, and man will worship thee, for nothing is more certain than bread. But if someone else gains possession of his conscience -- Oh! then he will cast away Thy bread and follow after him who has ensnared his conscience. In that Thou wast right. For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. That is true. But what happened? Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though Thou didst not love them at all -- Thou who didst come to give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men's freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings for ever. Thou didst desire man's free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.

"'So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness those forces are miracle, mystery and authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple and said to Thee, "If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father." But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course, Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft, though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel. Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, "Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He." Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him -- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. What though he is everywhere now rebelling against our power, and proud of his rebellion? It is the pride of a child and a schoolboy. They are little children rioting and barring out the teacher at school. But their childish delight will end; it will cost them dear. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors, Timours and Ghenghis-Khans, whirled like hurricanes over the face of the earth striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written, "Mystery." But then, and only then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all. And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones who could become elect, have grown weary waiting for Thee, and have transferred and will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner against Thee. Thou didst Thyself lift up that banner. But with us all will be happy and will no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

"'Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread made by their hands from them, to give it to them, without any miracle. They will see that we do not change the stones to bread, but in truth they will be more thankful for taking it from our hands than for the bread itself! For they will remember only too well that in old days, without our help, even the bread they made turned to stones in their hands, while since they have come back to us, the very stones have turned to bread in their hands. Too, too well will they know the value of complete submission! And until men know that, they will be unhappy. Who is most to blame for their not knowing it?-speak! Who scattered the flock and sent it astray on unknown paths? But the flock will come together again and will submit once more, and then it will be once for all. Then we shall give them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by nature. Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions. They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they. It is prophesied that Thou wilt come again in victory, Thou wilt come with Thy chosen, the proud and strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, but we have saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds in her hands the mystery, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise up again, and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to Thee the thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and say: "Judge us if Thou canst and darest." Know that I fear Thee not. Know that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting "to make up the number." But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, to-morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee. Dixi.'"

Ivan stopped. He was carried away as he talked, and spoke with excitement; when he had finished, he suddenly smiled.

Alyosha had listened in silence; towards the end he was greatly moved and seemed several times on the point of interrupting, but restrained himself. Now his words came with a rush.

"But... that's absurd!" he cried, flushing. "Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him- as you meant it to be. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that the way to understand it? That's not the idea of it in the Orthodox Church.... That's Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, it's false-those are the worst of the Catholics the Inquisitors, the Jesuits!... And there could not be such a fantastic creature as your Inquisitor. What are these sins of mankind they take on themselves? Who are these keepers of the mystery who have taken some curse upon themselves for the happiness of mankind? When have they been seen? We know the Jesuits, they are spoken ill of, but surely they are not what you describe? They are not that at all, not at all.... They are simply the Romish army for the earthly sovereignty of the world in the future, with the Pontiff of Rome for Emperor... that's their ideal, but there's no sort of mystery or lofty melancholy about it.... It's simple lust of power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination-something like a universal serfdom with them as masters-that's all they stand for. They don't even believe in God perhaps. Your suffering Inquisitor is a mere fantasy."

"Stay, stay," laughed Ivan. "how hot you are! A fantasy you say, let it be so! Of course it's a fantasy. But allow me to say: do you really think that the Roman Catholic movement of the last centuries is actually nothing but the lust of power, of filthy earthly gain? Is that Father Paissy's teaching?"

"No, no, on the contrary, Father Paissy did once say something rather the same as you... but of course it's not the same, not a bit the same," Alyosha hastily corrected himself.

"A precious admission, in spite of your 'not a bit the same.' I ask you why your Jesuits and Inquisitors have united simply for vile material gain? Why can there not be among them one martyr oppressed by great sorrow and loving humanity? You see, only suppose that there was one such man among all those who desire nothing but filthy material gain-if there's only one like my old Inquisitor, who had himself eaten roots in the desert and made frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and perfect. But yet all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he turned back and joined- the clever people. Surely that could have happened?"

"Joined whom, what clever people?" cried Alyosha, completely carried away. "They have no such great cleverness and no mysteries and secrets.... Perhaps nothing but Atheism, that's all their secret. Your Inquisitor does not believe in God, that's his secret!"

"What if it is so! At last you have guessed it. It's perfectly true, it's true that that's the whole secret, but isn't that suffering, at least for a man like that, who has wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could not shake off his incurable love of humanity? In his old age he reached the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly, 'incomplete, empirical creatures created in jest.' And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think themselves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long. Is not that tragic? And if only one such stood at the head of the whole army 'filled with the lust of power only for the sake of filthy gain'- would not one such be enough to make a tragedy? More than that, one such standing at the head is enough to create the actual leading idea of the Roman Church with all its armies and Jesuits, its highest idea. I tell you frankly that I firmly believe that there has always been such a man among those who stood at the head of the movement. Who knows, there may have been some such even among the Roman Popes. Who knows, perhaps the spirit of that accursed old man who loves mankind so obstinately in his own way, is to be found even now in a whole multitude of such old men, existing not by chance but by agreement, as a secret league formed long ago for the guarding of the mystery, to guard it from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them happy. No doubt it is so, and so it must be indeed. I fancy that even among the Masons there's something of the same mystery at the bottom, and that that's why the Catholics so detest the Masons as their rivals breaking up the unity of the idea, while it is so essential that there should be one flock and one shepherd.... But from the way I defend my idea I might be an author impatient of your criticism. Enough of it."

"You are perhaps a Mason yourself!" broke suddenly from Alyosha. "You don't believe in God," he added, speaking this time very sorrowfully. He fancied besides that his brother was looking at him ironically. "How does your poem end?" he asked, suddenly looking down.

"Or was it the end?"

"I meant to end it like this. When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: 'Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!' And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away."

"And the old man?"

"The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea."

"And you with him, you too?" cried Alyosha, mournfully.

Ivan laughed.

"Why, it's all nonsense, Alyosha. It's only a senseless poem of a senseless student, who could never write two lines of verse. Why do you take it so seriously? Surely you don't suppose I am going straight off to the Jesuits, to join the men who are correcting His work? Good Lord, it's no business of mine. I told you, all I want is to live on to thirty, and then... dash the cup to the ground!"

"But the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love! How will you live, how will you love them?" Alyosha cried sorrowfully. "With such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you? No, that's just what you are going away for, to join them... if not, you will kill yourself, you can't endure it!"

"There is a strength to endure everything," Ivan said with a cold smile.

"The strength of the Karamazovs- the strength of the Karamazov baseness."

"To sink into debauchery, to stifle your soul with corruption, yes?"

"Possibly even that... only perhaps till I am thirty I shall escape it, and then-"

"How will you escape it? By what will you escape it? That's impossible with your ideas."

"In the Karamazov way, again."

"'Everything is lawful,' you mean? Everything is lawful, is that it?"

Ivan scowled, and all at once turned strangely pale.

"Ah, you've caught up yesterday's phrase, which so offended Muisov- and which Dmitri pounced upon so naively and paraphrased!" he smiled queerly. "Yes, if you like, 'everything is lawful' since the word has been said, I won't deny it. And Mitya's version isn't bad."

Alyosha looked at him in silence.

"I thought that going away from here I have you at least," Ivan said suddenly, with unexpected feeling; "but now I see that there is no place for me even in your heart, my dear hermit. The formula, 'all is lawful,' I won't renounce- will you renounce me for that, yes?"

Alyosha got up, went to him and softly kissed him on the lips.

"That's plagiarism," cried Ivan, highly delighted. "You stole that from my poem. Thank you though. Get up, Alyosha, it's time we were going, both of us."

They went out, but stopped when they reached the entrance of the restaurant.

"Listen, Alyosha," Ivan began in a resolute voice, "if I am really able to care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you. It's enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan't lose my desire for life yet. Is that enough for you? Take it as a declaration of love if you like. And now you go to the right and I to the left. And it's enough, do you hear, enough. I mean even if I don't go away to-morrow (I think I certainly shall go) and we meet again, don't say a word more on these subjects. I beg that particularly. And about Dmitri too, I ask you specially, never speak to me again," he added, with sudden irritation; "it's all exhausted, it has all been said over and over again, hasn't it? And I'll make you one promise in return for it. When at thirty, I want to 'dash the cup to the ground,' wherever I may be I'll come to have one more talk with you, even though it were from America, you may be sure of that. I'll come on purpose. It will be very interesting to have a look at you, to see what you'll be by that time. It's rather a solemn promise, you see. And we really may be parting for seven years or ten. Come, go now to your Pater Seraphicus, he is dying. If he dies without you, you will be angry with me for having kept you. Good-bye, kiss me once more; that's right, now go."

Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without looking back. It was just as Dmitri had left Alyosha the day before, though the parting had been very different. The strange resemblance flashed like an arrow through Alyosha's mind in the distress and dejection of that moment. He waited a little, looking after his brother. He suddenly noticed that Ivan swayed as he walked and that his right shoulder looked lower than his left. He had never noticed it before. But all at once he turned too, and almost ran to the monastery. It was nearly dark, and he felt almost frightened; something new was growing up in him for which he could not account. The wind had risen again as on the previous evening, and the ancient pines murmured gloomily about him when he entered the hermitage copse. He almost ran. "Pater Seraphicus -- he got that name from somewhere- where from?" Alyosha wondered. "Ivan, poor Ivan, and when shall I see you again?... Here is the hermitage. Yes, yes, that he is, Pater Seraphicus, he will save me- from him and for ever!"

Several times afterwards he wondered how he could, on leaving Ivan, so completely forget his brother Dmitri, though he had that morning, only a few hours before, so firmly resolved to find him and not to give up doing so, even should he be unable to return to the monastery that night.

[Siblesz]

XVII. CHAPTER V of Voyage to Brobdingnag; Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Several Contrivances of the Author to please the King and Queen. He shews his Skill in Musick. The King enquires into the State of Europe, which the Author relates to him. The King's Observations thereon.

I USED to attend the King's Levee once or twice a Week, and had often seen him under the Barber's Hand, which indeed was at first very terrible to behold: For the Razor was almost twice as long as an ordinary Scythe. His Majesty, according to the Custom of the Country, was only shaved twice a Week. I once prevailed on the Barber to give me some of the Suds or Lather, out of which I picked forty or fifty of the strongest Stumps of Hair. I then took a Piece of fine Wood, and cut it like the back of a Comb, making several Holes in it at equal Distance with as small a Needle as I could get from Glumdalclitch. I fixed in the Stumps so artificially, scraping and sloping them with my Knife toward the Points, that I made a very tolerable Comb; which was a seasonable Supply, my own being so much broken in the Teeth, that it was almost useless: Neither did I know any Artist in that Country so nice and exact, as would undertake to make me another.

And this puts me in Mind of an Amusement wherein I spent many of my leisure Hours. I desired the Queen's Woman to save for me the Combings of her Majesty's Hair, whereof in Time I got a good Quantity, and consulting with my Friend the Cabinet-Maker, who had received general Orders to do little Jobbs for me, I directed him to make two Chair-Frames, no larger than those I had in my Box, and then to bore little Holes with a fine Awl round those Parts where I designed the Backs and Seats; through these Holes I wove the strongest Hairs I could pick out, just after the manner of Cane-Chairs in England. When they were finished, I made a Present of them to her Majesty, who kept them in her Cabinet, and used to shew them for Curiosities, as indeed they were the Wonder of every one that beheld them. The Queen would have had me sit upon one of these Chairs, but I absolutely refused to obey her, protesting I would rather die a thousand Deaths than place a dishonourable Part of my Body on those precious Hairs that once adorned her Majesty's Head. Of these Hairs (as I had always a Mechanical Genius) I likewise made a neat little Purse about five Foot long, with her Majesty's Name decyphered in Gold Letters, which I gave to Glumdalclitch, by the Queen's Consent. To say the Truth, it was more for Show than Use, being not of Strength to bear the Weight of the larger Coins, and therefore she kept nothing in it but some little Toys that Girls are fond of.

The King, who delighted in Musick, had frequent Consorts at Court, to which I was sometimes carried, and set in my Box on a Table to hear them: But, the Noise was so great, that I could hardly distinguish the Tunes. I am confident that all the Drums and Trumpets of a Royal Army, beating and sounding together just at your Ears, could not equal it. My practice was to have my Box removed from the Places where the Performers sat, as far as I could, then to shut the Doors and Windows of it, and draw the Window-Curtains; after which I found their Musick not disagreeable.

I had learned in my Youth to play a little upon the Spinet Glumdalclitch kept one in her Chamber, and a Master attended twice a Week to teach her: I call it a Spinet, because it somewhat resembled that Instrument, and was play'd upon in the same Manner. A fancy came into my Head that I would entertain the King and Queen with an English Tune upon this Instrument. But this appeared extremely difficult: For, the Spinet was near sixty Foot long, each key being almost a Foot wide, so that, with my Arms extended, I could not reach to above five Keys, and to press them down required a good smart Stroak with my Fist, which would be too great a Labour, and to no Purpose. The Method I contrived was this. I prepared two round Sticks about the Bigness of common Cudgels; they were thicker at one End than the other, and I covered the thicker Ends with a Piece of a Mouse's Skin, that by rapping on them, I might neither damage the Tops of the Keys, nor interrupt the Sound. Before the Spinet a Bench was placed about four Foot below the Keys, and I was put upon the Bench. I ran sideling upon it that Way and this, as fast as I could, banging the proper Keys with my two Sticks, and made a Shift to play a Jigg, to the great Satisfaction of both their Majesties: But it was the most violent Exercise I ever underwent, and yet I could not strike above sixteen Keys, nor, consequently, play the Bass and Treble together, as other Artists do; which was a great Disadvantage to my Performance.

The King, who, as I before observed, was a Prince of excellent Understanding, would frequently order that I should be brought in my Box, and set upon the Table in his Closet: He would then command me to bring one of my Chairs out of the Box, and sit down within three Yards Distance upon the Top of the Cabinet, which brought me almost to a level with his Face. In this Manner I had several Conversations with him. I one Day took the Freedom to tell his Majesty, that the Contempt he discovered towards Europe, and the rest of the World, did not seem answerable to those excellent Qualities of the Mind he was Master of. That Reason did not extend it self with the Bulk of the Body: On the contrary, we observed in our Country, that the tallest Persons were usually least provided with it. That among other Animals, Bees and Ants had the Reputation of more Industry, Art and Sagacity, than many of the larger Kinds; and that, as inconsiderable as he took me to be, I hoped I might live to do his Majesty some signal Service. The King heard me with Attention, and began to conceive a much better Opinion of me than he had ever before. He desired I would give him as exact an Account of the Government of England, as I possibly could; because, as fond as Princes commonly are of their own Customs (for so he conjectured of other Monarchs, by my former Discourses), he should be glad to hear of any Thing that might deserve Imitation.

Imagine with thy self, courteous Reader, how often I then wished for the Tongue of Demosthenes or Cicero, that might have enabled me to celebrate the Praise of my own dear native Country in a Stile equal to its Merits and Felicity.

I began my Discourse by informing his Majesty that our Dominions consisted of two Islands, which composed three mighty Kingdoms under one Sovereign, beside our Plantations in America. I dwelt long upon the Fertility of our Soil, and the Temperature of our Climate. I then spoke at large upon the Constitution of an English Parliament, partly made up of an illustrious Body called the House of Peers, Persons of the noblest Blood, and of the most ancient and ample Patrimonies. I described that extraordinary Care always taken of their Education in Arts and Arms, to qualify them for being Counsellors born to the King and Kingdom; to have a share in the Legislature; to be Members of the highest Court of Judicature, from whence there could be no Appeal; and to be Champions always ready for the Defence of their Prince and Country, by their Valour, Conduct, and Fidelity. That these were the Ornament and Bulwark of the Kingdom, worthy Followers of their most renowned Ancestors, whose Honour had been the Reward of their Virtue, from which their Posterity were never once known to degenerate. To these we joined several holy Persons, as part of that Assembly, under the Title of Bishops, whose peculiar Business it is to take care of Religion, and of those who instruct the People therein. These were searched, and sought out, through the whole Nation, by the Prince and his wisest Counsellors, among such of the Priesthood as were most deservedly distinguished by the Sanctity of their Lives, and the depth of their Erudition; who were indeed the spiritual Fathers of the Clergy and the People.

That, the other Part of the Parliament consisted of an Assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal Gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the People themselves, for their great Abilities and Love of their Country, to represent the Wisdom of the whole Nation. And these two Bodies make up the most august Assembly in Europe, to whom, in Conjunction with the Prince, the whole Legislature is Committed.

I then descended to the Courts of Justice, over which the Judges, those venerable Sages and Interpreters of the Law presided, for determining the disputed Rights and Properties of Men, as well as for the Punishment of Vice, and Protection of Innocence. I mentioned the prudent Management of our Treasury; the Valour and Atchievements of our Forces by Sea and Land. I computed the Number of our People, by reckoning how many Millions there might be of each religious Sect, or political Party among us. I did not omit even our Sports and Pastimes, or any other Particular which I thought might redound to the Honour of my Country. And I finished all with a brief historical Account of Affairs and Events in England for about an hundred Years past.

This Conversation was not ended under five Audiences, each of several Hours, and the King heard the whole with great Attention, frequently taking Notes of what I spoke, as well as Memorandums of all Questions he intended to ask me.

When I had put an End to these long Discourses, his Majesty in a sixth Audience consulting his Notes, proposed many Doubts, Queries, and Objections, upon every Article. He asked what Methods were used to cultivate the Minds and Bodies of our young Nobility, and in what kind of Business they commonly spent the first and teachable Part of their Lives. What Course was taken to supply that Assembly when any Noble Family became extinct. What Qualifications were necessary in those who were to be created new Lords: Whether the Humour of the Prince, a Sum of Money to a Court Lady or a Prime Minister, or a Design of strengthening a Party opposite to the publick Interest, ever happened to be Motives in those Advancements. What Share of Knowledge these Lords had in the Laws of their Country, and how they came by it, so as to enable them to decide the Properties of their Fellow-Subjects in the last Resort. Whether they were always so free from Avarice, Partialities, or Want, that a Bribe, or some other sinister View, could have no Place among them. Whether those holy Lords I spoke of were always promoted to that Rank upon account of their Knowledge in religious Matters, and the Sanctity of their Lives, had never been Compliers with the Times while they were common Priests, or slavish prostitute Chaplains to some Nobleman, whose Opinions they continued servilely to follow after they were admitted into that Assembly.

He then desired to know what Arts were practiced in electing those whom I called Commoners: Whether a Stranger with a strong Purse might not influence the vulgar Voters to choose him before their own Landlord, or the most considerable Gentleman in the Neighbourhood. How it came to pass, that People were so violently bent upon getting into this Assembly, which I allowed to be a great Trouble and Expense, often to the Ruin of their Families, without any Salary or Pension: Because this appeared such an exalted Strain of Virtue and publick Spirit, that his Majesty seemed to doubt it might possibly not be always sincere: and he desired to know whether such zealous Gentlemen could have any Views of refunding themselves for the Charges and Trouble they were at, by sacrificing the publick Good to the Designs of a weak and vicious Prince in Conjunction with a corrupted Ministry. He multiplied his Questions, and sifted me thoroughly upon every Part of this Head, proposing numberless Enquiries and Objections, which I think it not prudent or convenient to repeat.

Upon what I said in relation to our Courts of Justice, his Majesty desired to be satisfied in several Points: And this I was the better able to do, having been formerly almost ruined by a long Suit in Chancery, which was decreed for me with Costs. He asked, what Time was usually spent in determining between Right and Wrong, and what Degree of Expence. Whether Advocates and Orators had Liberty to plead in Causes manifestly known to be unjust, vexatious, or oppressive. Whether Party in Religion or Politicks were observed to be of any Weight in the Scale of Justice. Whether those pleading Orators were Persons educated in the general Knowledge of Equity, or only in provincial, national, and other local Customs. Whether they or their Judges had any Part in penning those Laws which they assumed the Liberty of interpreting and glossing upon at their Pleasure. Whether they had ever at different Times pleaded for and against the same Cause, and cited Precedents to prove contrary Opinions. Whether they were a rich or a poor Corporation. Whether they received any pecuniary Reward for pleading or delivering their Opinions. And particularly whether they were ever admitted as Members in the lower Senate.

He fell next upon the Management of our Treasury; and said, he thought my Memory had failed me, because I computed our Taxes at about five or six Millions a Year, and when I came to mention the Issues, he found they sometimes amounted to more than double; for the Notes he had taken were very particular in this Point, because he hoped, as he told me, that the Knowledge of our Conduct might be useful to him, and he could not be deceived in his Calculations. But, if what I told him were true, he was still at a Loss how a Kingdom could run out of its Estate like a private Person. He asked me, who were our Creditors; and where we should find Money to pay them. He wonder'd to hear me talk of such chargeable and extensive Wars; that certainly we must be a quarrelsome People, or live among very bad Neighbours, and that our Generals must needs be richer than our Kings. He asked what Business we had out of our own Islands, unless upon the Score of Trade or Treaty, or to defend the Coasts with our Fleet. Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing Army in the midst of Peace, and among a free People. He said, if we were governed by our own Consent in the Persons of our Representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my Opinion, whether a private Man's House might not better be defended by himself, his Children, and Family, than by half a dozen rascals picked up at a venture in the Streets, for small Wages, who might get a hundred times more by cutting their Throats.

He laughed at my odd Kind of Arithmetick (as he was pleased to call it) in reckoning the Numbers of our People by a Computation drawn from the several Sects among us in Religion and Politicks. He said, he knew no Reason, why those who entertain Opinions prejudicial to the Publick, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was Tyranny in any Government to require the first, so it was Weakness not to enforce the second: For a Man may be allowed to keep poisons in his Closet, but not to vend them about for Cordials.

He observed, that among the Diversions of our Nobility and Gentry, I had mentioned Gaming. He desired to know at what Age this Entertainment was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their Time it employed; whether it ever went so high as to affect their Fortunes: Whether mean vicious People, by their Dexterity in that Art, might not arrive at great Riches, and sometimes keep our very Nobles in Dependance, as well as habituate them to vile Companions, wholly take them from the Improvement of their Minds, and force them, by the Losses they have received, to learn and practice that infamous Dexterity upon others.

He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce.

His Majesty in another Audience was at the Pains to recapitulate the Sum of all I had spoken, compared the Questions he made with the Answers I had given; then taking me into his Hands, and stroaking me gently, delivered himself in these Words, which I shall never forget nor the Manner he spoke them in: My little Friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country: You have clearly proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice may be sometimes the only Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator: That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some Lines of an Institution, which in its Original might have been tolerable, but these half erazed, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by Corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one Virtue is required towards the Procurement of any one Station among you, much less that Men are ennobled on Account of their Virtue, that Priests are advanced for their Piety or Learning, Soldiers for their Conduct or Valour, Judges for their Integrity, Senators for the Love of their Country, or Counsellors for their Wisdom. As for yourself, (continued the King,) who have spent the greatest Part of your Life in Travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pain wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

[Siblesz]

CHAPTER VII

The Author's Love of his Country. He makes a Proposal of much Advantage to the King, which is rejected. The King's great Ignorance in Politicks. The Learning of the Country very imperfect and confined. Their Laws and millitary Affairs, and Parties in the State.

Nothing but an extreme Love of Truth could have hinder'd me from concealing this Part of my Story. It was in vain to discover my Resentments, which were always turned into Ridicule; and I was forced to rest with Patience while my noble and most beloved Country was so injuriously treated. I am heartily sorry as any of my Readers can possibly be, that such an Occasion was given: But this Prince happened to be so curious and inquisitive upon every Particular, that it could not consist either with Gratitude or good Manners to refuse giving him what Satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own Vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his Questions, and gave to every Point a more favourable Turn by many Degrees than the Strictness of Truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable Partiality to my own Country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis with so much Justice recommends to an Historian : I would hide the Frailties and Deformities of my political Mother, and place her Virtues and Beauties in the most advantageous Light. This was my sincere Endeavour in those many Discourses I had with that mighty Monarch, although it unfortunately failed of Success.
But great Allowances should be given to a King who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the World, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the Manners and Customs that most prevail in other Nations: The want of which Knowledge will ever produce many Prejudices, and a certain Narrowness of thinking, from which we and the politer Countries of Europe are wholly exempted. And it would be hard, indeed, if so remote a Prince's Notions of Virtue and Vice were to be offered as a standard for all Mankind.

To confirm what I have now said, and further, to shew the miserable Effects of a confined Education, I shall here insert a Passage which will hardly obtain Belief. In hopes to ingratiate my self farther into his Majesty's Favour, I told him of an Invention discovered between three and four hundred Years ago, to make a certain Powder, into a Heap of which the smallest Spark of Fire falling, would kindle the whole in a Moment, although it were as big as a Mountain, and make it all fly up in the Air together, with a Noise and Agitation greater than Thunder. That a proper Quantity of this Powder rammed into a hollow Tube of Brass or Iron, according to its Bigness, would drive a Ball of Iron or Lead with such Violence and Speed, as nothing was able to sustain its Force. That the largest Balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole Ranks of an Army at once, but batter the strongest Walls to the Ground, sink down Ships, with a Thousand Men in each, to the Bottom of the Sea; and, when linked together by a Chain, would cut through Masts and Rigging, divide hundreds of Bodies in the Middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this Powder into large hollow Balls of Iron, and discharged them by an Engine into some City we were besieging, which would rip up the Pavements, tear the Houses to pieces, burst and throw Splinters on every Side, dashing out the Brains of all who came near. That I knew the Ingredients very well, which were cheap, and common; I understood the Manner of compounding them, and could direct his Workmen how to make those Tubes of a Size proportionable to all other Things in his Majesty's Kingdom, and the largest need not be above an hundred Foot long; twenty or thirty of which Tubes, charged with the proper Quantity of Powder and Balls, would batter down the Walls of the strongest Town in his Dominions in a few Hours, or destroy the whole Metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute Commands. This I humbly offered to his Majesty, as a small Tribute of Acknowledgment in Return of so many Marks that I had received of his Royal Favour and Protection.

The King was struck with Horror at the Description I had given of those terrible Engines, and the Proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an Insect as I (these were his Expressions) could entertain such inhuman Ideas, and in so Familiar a Manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the Scenes of Blood and Desolation, which I had painted as the common Effects of those destructive Machines, whereof he said some evil Genius, Enemy to Mankind, must have been the first Contriver. As for himself, he protested that although few Things delighted him so much as new Discoveries in Art or in Nature, yet he would rather lose half his Kingdom than be privy to such a Secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my Life, never to mention any more.

A strange Effect of narrow Principles and short Views! that a Prince possessed of every Quality which procures Veneration, Love, and Esteem; of strong Parts, great Wisdom, and profound Learning, endued with admirable Talents for Government, and almost adored by his Subjects, should from a nice unnecessary Scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no Conception, let slip an Opportunity to put into his Hands, that would have made him absolute Master of the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People. Neither do I say this with the least Intention to detract from the many Virtues of that excellent King, whose Character I am sensible will on this account be very much lessened in the Opinion of an English Reader: But I take this Defect among them to have risen from their Ignorance, they not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science, as the more acute Wits of Europe have done. For I remember very well, in a Discourse one Day with the King, when I happened to say there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government, it gave him (directly contrary to my Intention) a very mean Opinion of our Understandings. He professed both to abominate and despise all Mystery, Refinement, and Intrigue, either in a Prince or a Minister. He could not tell what I meant by Secrets of State, where an Enemy or some Rival Nation were not in the Case. He confined the Knowledge of Governing within very narrow Bounds; to common Sense and Reason, to Justice and Lenity, to the speedy Determination of civil and criminal Causes; with some other obvious Topicks, which are not worth considering. And, he gave it for his Opinion, that whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two blades of Grass to grow upon a Spot of Ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential Service to his Country than the whole Race of Politicians put together.

The Learning of this People is very defective, consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematicks, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life, to the Improvement of Agriculture and all mechanical Arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions and Transcendentals, I could never drive the least Conception into their heads.

No Law of that Country must exceed in Words the Number of Letters in their Alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But, indeed, few of them extend even to that Length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple Terms, wherein those People are not mercurial enough to discover above one Interpretation: And to write a Comment upon any Law is a capital Crime. As to the Decision of civil Causes, or Proceedings against Criminals, their Precedents are so few, that they have little Reason to boast of any extraordinary Skill in either.

They have had the Art of Printing, as well as the Chinese, Time out of mind: But their Libraries are not very large; for that of the King's which is reckoned the biggest, doth not amount to above a thousand Volumes, placed in a Gallery twelve hundred Foot long, from whence I had Liberty to borrow what Books I pleased. The Queen's Joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch's Rooms a kind of wooden Machine five and twenty Foot high, formed like a standing Ladder; the Steps were each fifty Foot long: It was indeed a moveable Pair of Stairs, the lowest End placed at ten Foot Distance from the Wall of the Chamber. The Book I had a Mind to read was put up leaning against the Wall: I first mounted to the upper Step of the Ladder, and turning my Face towards the Book, began at the Top of the Page, and so walking to the Right and Left about eight or ten Paces, according to the Length of the Lines, till I had gotten a little below the Level of mine Eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the Bottom: After which I mounted again, and began the other Page in the same manner, and so turned over the Leaf, which I could easily do with both my Hands, for it was as thick and stiff as Paste-board, and in the largest Folio's not above eighteen or twenty Foot long.

Their Stile is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid, for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary Words, or using various Expressions. I have perused many of their Books, especially those in History and Morality. Among the rest I was much diverted with a little old Treatise, which always lay in Glumdalclitch's Bed-Chamber, and belonged to her Governess, a grave elderly Gentlewoman, who dealt in Writings of Morality and Devotion. The Book treats of the Weakness of Human Kind, and is in little Esteem, except among the Women and the Vulgar. However, I was curious to see what an Author of that Country could say upon such a Subject. This Writer went through all the usual Topicks of European Moralists, shewing how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless an Animal was Man in his own Nature; how unable to defend himself from the Inclemencies of the Air, or the Fury of wild Beasts: How much he was excelled by one Creature in Strength, by another in Speed, by a third in Foresight, by a fourth in Industry. He added, that Nature was degenerated in these latter declining Ages of the World, and could now produce only small abortive Births in comparison of those in ancient Times. He said, it was very reasonable to think, not only that the Species of Men were originally much larger, but also, that there must have been Giants in former Ages, which, as it is asserted by History and Tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge Bones and Skulls casually dug up in several Parts of the Kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled Race of Man in our Days. He argued, that the very Laws of Nature absolutely required we should have been made in the Beginning, of a Size more large and robust, not so liable to Destruction from every little Accident of a Tile falling from an House, or a Stone cast from the Hand of a Boy, or of being drowned in a little Brook. From this way of Reasoning, the Author drew several moral Applications useful in the Conduct of Life, but needless here to repeat. For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this Talent was spread, of drawing Lectures in Morality, or, indeed, rather Matter of Discontent and Repining, from the Quarrels we raise with Nature. And, I believe, upon a strict Enquiry, those Quarrels might be shewn as ill-grounded among us, as they are among that People.

As to their Military Affairs, they boast that the King's Army consists of an hundred and seventy six thousand Foot, and thirty two thousand Horse: If that may be called an Army which is made up of Tradesmen in the several Cities, and Farmers in the Country, whose Commanders are only the Nobility and Gentry, without Pay or Reward. They are, indeed, perfect enough in their Exercises, and under very good Discipline, wherein I saw no great Merit; for how should it be otherwise, where every Farmer is under the Command of his own Landlord, and every Citizen under that of the principal Men in his own City, chosen after the Manner of Venice by Ballot?

I have often seen the Militia of Lorbrulgrud drawn out to exercise in a great Field near the City, of twenty Miles square. They were, in all, not above twenty five thousand Foot, and six thousand Horse; but it was impossible for me to compute their Number, considering the space of Ground they took up. A Cavalier mounted on a large Steed, might be about one hundred Foot high. I have seen this whole Body of Horse, upon a Word of Command, draw their Swords at once, and brandish them in the Air. Imagination can figure nothing so grand, so surprising, and so astonishing: It looked as if ten thousand Flashes of Lightning were darting at the same Time from every Quarter of the Sky.

I was curious to know how this Prince, to whose Dominions there is no Access from any other Country, came to think of Armies, or to teach his People the Practice of military Discipline. But I was soon informed, both by Conversation and reading their Histories: For, in the Course of many Ages they have been troubled with the same Disease, to which the whole race of Mankind is* subject; the Nobility often contending for Power, the People for Liberty, and the King for absolute Dominion. All which, however, happily tempered by the Laws of the Kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three Parties, and have once or more occasioned Civil Wars, the last whereof was happily put an End to by this Prince's Grandfather by a general Composition; and the Militia, then settled with common Consent, has been ever since kept in the strictest Duty.

[Siblesz]

XVII. CHAPTER VI of Voyage to Brobdingnag; Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Author's Love of his Country. He makes a Proposal of much Advantage to the King, which is rejected. The King's great Ignorance in Politicks. The Learning of the Country very imperfect and confined. Their Laws and millitary Affairs, and Parties in the State.

Nothing but an extreme Love of Truth could have hinder'd me from concealing this Part of my Story. It was in vain to discover my Resentments, which were always turned into Ridicule; and I was forced to rest with Patience while my noble and most beloved Country was so injuriously treated. I am heartily sorry as any of my Readers can possibly be, that such an Occasion was given: But this Prince happened to be so curious and inquisitive upon every Particular, that it could not consist either with Gratitude or good Manners to refuse giving him what Satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own Vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his Questions, and gave to every Point a more favourable Turn by many Degrees than the Strictness of Truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable Partiality to my own Country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis with so much Justice recommends to an Historian : I would hide the Frailties and Deformities of my political Mother, and place her Virtues and Beauties in the most advantageous Light. This was my sincere Endeavour in those many Discourses I had with that mighty Monarch, although it unfortunately failed of Success.
But great Allowances should be given to a King who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the World, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the Manners and Customs that most prevail in other Nations: The want of which Knowledge will ever produce many Prejudices, and a certain Narrowness of thinking, from which we and the politer Countries of Europe are wholly exempted. And it would be hard, indeed, if so remote a Prince's Notions of Virtue and Vice were to be offered as a standard for all Mankind.

To confirm what I have now said, and further, to shew the miserable Effects of a confined Education, I shall here insert a Passage which will hardly obtain Belief. In hopes to ingratiate my self farther into his Majesty's Favour, I told him of an Invention discovered between three and four hundred Years ago, to make a certain Powder, into a Heap of which the smallest Spark of Fire falling, would kindle the whole in a Moment, although it were as big as a Mountain, and make it all fly up in the Air together, with a Noise and Agitation greater than Thunder. That a proper Quantity of this Powder rammed into a hollow Tube of Brass or Iron, according to its Bigness, would drive a Ball of Iron or Lead with such Violence and Speed, as nothing was able to sustain its Force. That the largest Balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole Ranks of an Army at once, but batter the strongest Walls to the Ground, sink down Ships, with a Thousand Men in each, to the Bottom of the Sea; and, when linked together by a Chain, would cut through Masts and Rigging, divide hundreds of Bodies in the Middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this Powder into large hollow Balls of Iron, and discharged them by an Engine into some City we were besieging, which would rip up the Pavements, tear the Houses to pieces, burst and throw Splinters on every Side, dashing out the Brains of all who came near. That I knew the Ingredients very well, which were cheap, and common; I understood the Manner of compounding them, and could direct his Workmen how to make those Tubes of a Size proportionable to all other Things in his Majesty's Kingdom, and the largest need not be above an hundred Foot long; twenty or thirty of which Tubes, charged with the proper Quantity of Powder and Balls, would batter down the Walls of the strongest Town in his Dominions in a few Hours, or destroy the whole Metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute Commands. This I humbly offered to his Majesty, as a small Tribute of Acknowledgment in Return of so many Marks that I had received of his Royal Favour and Protection.

The King was struck with Horror at the Description I had given of those terrible Engines, and the Proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an Insect as I (these were his Expressions) could entertain such inhuman Ideas, and in so Familiar a Manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the Scenes of Blood and Desolation, which I had painted as the common Effects of those destructive Machines, whereof he said some evil Genius, Enemy to Mankind, must have been the first Contriver. As for himself, he protested that although few Things delighted him so much as new Discoveries in Art or in Nature, yet he would rather lose half his Kingdom than be privy to such a Secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my Life, never to mention any more.

A strange Effect of narrow Principles and short Views! that a Prince possessed of every Quality which procures Veneration, Love, and Esteem; of strong Parts, great Wisdom, and profound Learning, endued with admirable Talents for Government, and almost adored by his Subjects, should from a nice unnecessary Scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no Conception, let slip an Opportunity to put into his Hands, that would have made him absolute Master of the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People. Neither do I say this with the least Intention to detract from the many Virtues of that excellent King, whose Character I am sensible will on this account be very much lessened in the Opinion of an English Reader: But I take this Defect among them to have risen from their Ignorance, they not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science, as the more acute Wits of Europe have done. For I remember very well, in a Discourse one Day with the King, when I happened to say there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government, it gave him (directly contrary to my Intention) a very mean Opinion of our Understandings. He professed both to abominate and despise all Mystery, Refinement, and Intrigue, either in a Prince or a Minister. He could not tell what I meant by Secrets of State, where an Enemy or some Rival Nation were not in the Case. He confined the Knowledge of Governing within very narrow Bounds; to common Sense and Reason, to Justice and Lenity, to the speedy Determination of civil and criminal Causes; with some other obvious Topicks, which are not worth considering. And, he gave it for his Opinion, that whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two blades of Grass to grow upon a Spot of Ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential Service to his Country than the whole Race of Politicians put together.

The Learning of this People is very defective, consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematicks, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life, to the Improvement of Agriculture and all mechanical Arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions and Transcendentals, I could never drive the least Conception into their heads.

No Law of that Country must exceed in Words the Number of Letters in their Alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But, indeed, few of them extend even to that Length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple Terms, wherein those People are not mercurial enough to discover above one Interpretation: And to write a Comment upon any Law is a capital Crime. As to the Decision of civil Causes, or Proceedings against Criminals, their Precedents are so few, that they have little Reason to boast of any extraordinary Skill in either.

They have had the Art of Printing, as well as the Chinese, Time out of mind: But their Libraries are not very large; for that of the King's which is reckoned the biggest, doth not amount to above a thousand Volumes, placed in a Gallery twelve hundred Foot long, from whence I had Liberty to borrow what Books I pleased. The Queen's Joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch's Rooms a kind of wooden Machine five and twenty Foot high, formed like a standing Ladder; the Steps were each fifty Foot long: It was indeed a moveable Pair of Stairs, the lowest End placed at ten Foot Distance from the Wall of the Chamber. The Book I had a Mind to read was put up leaning against the Wall: I first mounted to the upper Step of the Ladder, and turning my Face towards the Book, began at the Top of the Page, and so walking to the Right and Left about eight or ten Paces, according to the Length of the Lines, till I had gotten a little below the Level of mine Eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the Bottom: After which I mounted again, and began the other Page in the same manner, and so turned over the Leaf, which I could easily do with both my Hands, for it was as thick and stiff as Paste-board, and in the largest Folio's not above eighteen or twenty Foot long.

Their Stile is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid, for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary Words, or using various Expressions. I have perused many of their Books, especially those in History and Morality. Among the rest I was much diverted with a little old Treatise, which always lay in Glumdalclitch's Bed-Chamber, and belonged to her Governess, a grave elderly Gentlewoman, who dealt in Writings of Morality and Devotion. The Book treats of the Weakness of Human Kind, and is in little Esteem, except among the Women and the Vulgar. However, I was curious to see what an Author of that Country could say upon such a Subject. This Writer went through all the usual Topicks of European Moralists, shewing how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless an Animal was Man in his own Nature; how unable to defend himself from the Inclemencies of the Air, or the Fury of wild Beasts: How much he was excelled by one Creature in Strength, by another in Speed, by a third in Foresight, by a fourth in Industry. He added, that Nature was degenerated in these latter declining Ages of the World, and could now produce only small abortive Births in comparison of those in ancient Times. He said, it was very reasonable to think, not only that the Species of Men were originally much larger, but also, that there must have been Giants in former Ages, which, as it is asserted by History and Tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge Bones and Skulls casually dug up in several Parts of the Kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled Race of Man in our Days. He argued, that the very Laws of Nature absolutely required we should have been made in the Beginning, of a Size more large and robust, not so liable to Destruction from every little Accident of a Tile falling from an House, or a Stone cast from the Hand of a Boy, or of being drowned in a little Brook. From this way of Reasoning, the Author drew several moral Applications useful in the Conduct of Life, but needless here to repeat. For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this Talent was spread, of drawing Lectures in Morality, or, indeed, rather Matter of Discontent and Repining, from the Quarrels we raise with Nature. And, I believe, upon a strict Enquiry, those Quarrels might be shewn as ill-grounded among us, as they are among that People.

As to their Military Affairs, they boast that the King's Army consists of an hundred and seventy six thousand Foot, and thirty two thousand Horse: If that may be called an Army which is made up of Tradesmen in the several Cities, and Farmers in the Country, whose Commanders are only the Nobility and Gentry, without Pay or Reward. They are, indeed, perfect enough in their Exercises, and under very good Discipline, wherein I saw no great Merit; for how should it be otherwise, where every Farmer is under the Command of his own Landlord, and every Citizen under that of the principal Men in his own City, chosen after the Manner of Venice by Ballot?

I have often seen the Militia of Lorbrulgrud drawn out to exercise in a great Field near the City, of twenty Miles square. They were, in all, not above twenty five thousand Foot, and six thousand Horse; but it was impossible for me to compute their Number, considering the space of Ground they took up. A Cavalier mounted on a large Steed, might be about one hundred Foot high. I have seen this whole Body of Horse, upon a Word of Command, draw their Swords at once, and brandish them in the Air. Imagination can figure nothing so grand, so surprising, and so astonishing: It looked as if ten thousand Flashes of Lightning were darting at the same Time from every Quarter of the Sky.

I was curious to know how this Prince, to whose Dominions there is no Access from any other Country, came to think of Armies, or to teach his People the Practice of military Discipline. But I was soon informed, both by Conversation and reading their Histories: For, in the Course of many Ages they have been troubled with the same Disease, to which the whole race of Mankind is* subject; the Nobility often contending for Power, the People for Liberty, and the King for absolute Dominion. All which, however, happily tempered by the Laws of the Kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three Parties, and have once or more occasioned Civil Wars, the last whereof was happily put an End to by this Prince's Grandfather by a general Composition; and the Militia, then settled with common Consent, has been ever since kept in the strictest Duty.

[Siblesz]

CHAPTER VII

The Author's Love of his Country. He makes a Proposal of much Advantage to the King, which is rejected. The King's great Ignorance in Politicks. The Learning of the Country very imperfect and confined. Their Laws and millitary Affairs, and Parties in the State.

Nothing but an extreme Love of Truth could have hinder'd me from concealing this Part of my Story. It was in vain to discover my Resentments, which were always turned into Ridicule; and I was forced to rest with Patience while my noble and most beloved Country was so injuriously treated. I am heartily sorry as any of my Readers can possibly be, that such an Occasion was given: But this Prince happened to be so curious and inquisitive upon every Particular, that it could not consist either with Gratitude or good Manners to refuse giving him what Satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own Vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his Questions, and gave to every Point a more favourable Turn by many Degrees than the Strictness of Truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable Partiality to my own Country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis with so much Justice recommends to an Historian : I would hide the Frailties and Deformities of my political Mother, and place her Virtues and Beauties in the most advantageous Light. This was my sincere Endeavour in those many Discourses I had with that mighty Monarch, although it unfortunately failed of Success.
But great Allowances should be given to a King who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the World, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the Manners and Customs that most prevail in other Nations: The want of which Knowledge will ever produce many Prejudices, and a certain Narrowness of thinking, from which we and the politer Countries of Europe are wholly exempted. And it would be hard, indeed, if so remote a Prince's Notions of Virtue and Vice were to be offered as a standard for all Mankind.

To confirm what I have now said, and further, to shew the miserable Effects of a confined Education, I shall here insert a Passage which will hardly obtain Belief. In hopes to ingratiate my self farther into his Majesty's Favour, I told him of an Invention discovered between three and four hundred Years ago, to make a certain Powder, into a Heap of which the smallest Spark of Fire falling, would kindle the whole in a Moment, although it were as big as a Mountain, and make it all fly up in the Air together, with a Noise and Agitation greater than Thunder. That a proper Quantity of this Powder rammed into a hollow Tube of Brass or Iron, according to its Bigness, would drive a Ball of Iron or Lead with such Violence and Speed, as nothing was able to sustain its Force. That the largest Balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole Ranks of an Army at once, but batter the strongest Walls to the Ground, sink down Ships, with a Thousand Men in each, to the Bottom of the Sea; and, when linked together by a Chain, would cut through Masts and Rigging, divide hundreds of Bodies in the Middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this Powder into large hollow Balls of Iron, and discharged them by an Engine into some City we were besieging, which would rip up the Pavements, tear the Houses to pieces, burst and throw Splinters on every Side, dashing out the Brains of all who came near. That I knew the Ingredients very well, which were cheap, and common; I understood the Manner of compounding them, and could direct his Workmen how to make those Tubes of a Size proportionable to all other Things in his Majesty's Kingdom, and the largest need not be above an hundred Foot long; twenty or thirty of which Tubes, charged with the proper Quantity of Powder and Balls, would batter down the Walls of the strongest Town in his Dominions in a few Hours, or destroy the whole Metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute Commands. This I humbly offered to his Majesty, as a small Tribute of Acknowledgment in Return of so many Marks that I had received of his Royal Favour and Protection.

The King was struck with Horror at the Description I had given of those terrible Engines, and the Proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an Insect as I (these were his Expressions) could entertain such inhuman Ideas, and in so Familiar a Manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the Scenes of Blood and Desolation, which I had painted as the common Effects of those destructive Machines, whereof he said some evil Genius, Enemy to Mankind, must have been the first Contriver. As for himself, he protested that although few Things delighted him so much as new Discoveries in Art or in Nature, yet he would rather lose half his Kingdom than be privy to such a Secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my Life, never to mention any more.

A strange Effect of narrow Principles and short Views! that a Prince possessed of every Quality which procures Veneration, Love, and Esteem; of strong Parts, great Wisdom, and profound Learning, endued with admirable Talents for Government, and almost adored by his Subjects, should from a nice unnecessary Scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no Conception, let slip an Opportunity to put into his Hands, that would have made him absolute Master of the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People. Neither do I say this with the least Intention to detract from the many Virtues of that excellent King, whose Character I am sensible will on this account be very much lessened in the Opinion of an English Reader: But I take this Defect among them to have risen from their Ignorance, they not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science, as the more acute Wits of Europe have done. For I remember very well, in a Discourse one Day with the King, when I happened to say there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government, it gave him (directly contrary to my Intention) a very mean Opinion of our Understandings. He professed both to abominate and despise all Mystery, Refinement, and Intrigue, either in a Prince or a Minister. He could not tell what I meant by Secrets of State, where an Enemy or some Rival Nation were not in the Case. He confined the Knowledge of Governing within very narrow Bounds; to common Sense and Reason, to Justice and Lenity, to the speedy Determination of civil and criminal Causes; with some other obvious Topicks, which are not worth considering. And, he gave it for his Opinion, that whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two blades of Grass to grow upon a Spot of Ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential Service to his Country than the whole Race of Politicians put together.

The Learning of this People is very defective, consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematicks, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life, to the Improvement of Agriculture and all mechanical Arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions and Transcendentals, I could never drive the least Conception into their heads.

No Law of that Country must exceed in Words the Number of Letters in their Alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But, indeed, few of them extend even to that Length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple Terms, wherein those People are not mercurial enough to discover above one Interpretation: And to write a Comment upon any Law is a capital Crime. As to the Decision of civil Causes, or Proceedings against Criminals, their Precedents are so few, that they have little Reason to boast of any extraordinary Skill in either.

They have had the Art of Printing, as well as the Chinese, Time out of mind: But their Libraries are not very large; for that of the King's which is reckoned the biggest, doth not amount to above a thousand Volumes, placed in a Gallery twelve hundred Foot long, from whence I had Liberty to borrow what Books I pleased. The Queen's Joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch's Rooms a kind of wooden Machine five and twenty Foot high, formed like a standing Ladder; the Steps were each fifty Foot long: It was indeed a moveable Pair of Stairs, the lowest End placed at ten Foot Distance from the Wall of the Chamber. The Book I had a Mind to read was put up leaning against the Wall: I first mounted to the upper Step of the Ladder, and turning my Face towards the Book, began at the Top of the Page, and so walking to the Right and Left about eight or ten Paces, according to the Length of the Lines, till I had gotten a little below the Level of mine Eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the Bottom: After which I mounted again, and began the other Page in the same manner, and so turned over the Leaf, which I could easily do with both my Hands, for it was as thick and stiff as Paste-board, and in the largest Folio's not above eighteen or twenty Foot long.

Their Stile is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid, for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary Words, or using various Expressions. I have perused many of their Books, especially those in History and Morality. Among the rest I was much diverted with a little old Treatise, which always lay in Glumdalclitch's Bed-Chamber, and belonged to her Governess, a grave elderly Gentlewoman, who dealt in Writings of Morality and Devotion. The Book treats of the Weakness of Human Kind, and is in little Esteem, except among the Women and the Vulgar. However, I was curious to see what an Author of that Country could say upon such a Subject. This Writer went through all the usual Topicks of European Moralists, shewing how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless an Animal was Man in his own Nature; how unable to defend himself from the Inclemencies of the Air, or the Fury of wild Beasts: How much he was excelled by one Creature in Strength, by another in Speed, by a third in Foresight, by a fourth in Industry. He added, that Nature was degenerated in these latter declining Ages of the World, and could now produce only small abortive Births in comparison of those in ancient Times. He said, it was very reasonable to think, not only that the Species of Men were originally much larger, but also, that there must have been Giants in former Ages, which, as it is asserted by History and Tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge Bones and Skulls casually dug up in several Parts of the Kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled Race of Man in our Days. He argued, that the very Laws of Nature absolutely required we should have been made in the Beginning, of a Size more large and robust, not so liable to Destruction from every little Accident of a Tile falling from an House, or a Stone cast from the Hand of a Boy, or of being drowned in a little Brook. From this way of Reasoning, the Author drew several moral Applications useful in the Conduct of Life, but needless here to repeat. For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this Talent was spread, of drawing Lectures in Morality, or, indeed, rather Matter of Discontent and Repining, from the Quarrels we raise with Nature. And, I believe, upon a strict Enquiry, those Quarrels might be shewn as ill-grounded among us, as they are among that People.

As to their Military Affairs, they boast that the King's Army consists of an hundred and seventy six thousand Foot, and thirty two thousand Horse: If that may be called an Army which is made up of Tradesmen in the several Cities, and Farmers in the Country, whose Commanders are only the Nobility and Gentry, without Pay or Reward. They are, indeed, perfect enough in their Exercises, and under very good Discipline, wherein I saw no great Merit; for how should it be otherwise, where every Farmer is under the Command of his own Landlord, and every Citizen under that of the principal Men in his own City, chosen after the Manner of Venice by Ballot?

I have often seen the Militia of Lorbrulgrud drawn out to exercise in a great Field near the City, of twenty Miles square. They were, in all, not above twenty five thousand Foot, and six thousand Horse; but it was impossible for me to compute their Number, considering the space of Ground they took up. A Cavalier mounted on a large Steed, might be about one hundred Foot high. I have seen this whole Body of Horse, upon a Word of Command, draw their Swords at once, and brandish them in the Air. Imagination can figure nothing so grand, so surprising, and so astonishing: It looked as if ten thousand Flashes of Lightning were darting at the same Time from every Quarter of the Sky.

I was curious to know how this Prince, to whose Dominions there is no Access from any other Country, came to think of Armies, or to teach his People the Practice of military Discipline. But I was soon informed, both by Conversation and reading their Histories: For, in the Course of many Ages they have been troubled with the same Disease, to which the whole race of Mankind is* subject; the Nobility often contending for Power, the People for Liberty, and the King for absolute Dominion. All which, however, happily tempered by the Laws of the Kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three Parties, and have once or more occasioned Civil Wars, the last whereof was happily put an End to by this Prince's Grandfather by a general Composition; and the Militia, then settled with common Consent, has been ever since kept in the strictest Duty.

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I. On Religion, by Voltaire (1694-1778)

I MEDITATED last night; I was absorbed in the contemplation of nature; I admired the immensity, the course, the harmony of these infinite globes which the vulgar do not know how to admire.

I admired still more the intelligence which directs these vast forces. I said to myself : " One must be blind not to be dazzled by this spectacle; one must be stupid not to recognize the author of it; one must be mad not to worship Him. What tribute of worship should I render Him? Should not this tribute be the same in the whole of space, since it is the same supreme power which reigns equally in all space? Should not a thinking being who dwells in a star in the Milky Way offer Him the same homage as the thinking being on this little globe where we are? Light is uniform for the star Sirius and for us; moral philosophy must be uniform. If a sentient, thinking animal in Sirius is born of a tender father and mother who have been occupied with his happiness, he owes them as much love and care as we owe to our parents. If someone in the Milky Way sees a needy cripple, if he can relieve him and if he does not do it, he is guilty toward all globes. Everywhere the heart has the same duties: on the steps of the throne of God, if He has a throne; and in the depth of the abyss, if He is an abyss."

I was plunged in these ideas when one of those genii who fill the intermundane spaces came down to me. I recognized this same aerial creature who had appeared to me on another occasion to teach me how different God's judgments were from our own, and how a good action is preferable to a controversy.

He transported me into a desert all covered with piled up bones; and between these heaps of dead men there were walks of ever-green trees, and at the end of each walk a tall man of august mien, who regarded these sad remains with pity.

" Alas! my archangel," said I, " where have you brought me? "

" To desolation," he answered.

" And who are these fine patriarchs whom I see sad and motionless at the end of these green walks? they seem to be weeping over this countless crowd of dead."

" You shall know, poor human creature," answered the genius from the intermundane spaces; " but first of all you must weep."

He began with the first pile. " These," he said, " are the twenty-three thousand Jews who danced before a calf, with the twenty-four thousand who were killed while lying with Midianitish women. The number of those massacred for such errors and offences amounts to nearly three hundred thousand.

" In the other walks are the bones of the Christians slaughtered by each other for metaphysical disputes. They are divided into several heaps of four centuries each. One heap would have mounted right to the sky; they had to be divided."

" What! " I cried, " brothers have treated their brothers like this, and I have the misfortune to be of this brotherhood!"

" Here," said the spirit, " are the twelve million Americans killed in their fatherland because they had not been baptized."

" My God! why did you not leave these frightful bones to dry in the hemisphere where their bodies were born, and where they were consigned to so many different deaths? Why assemble here all these abominable monuments to barbarism and fanaticism? "

" To instruct you."

" Since you wish to instruct me," I said to the genius, " tell me if there have been peoples other than the Christians and the Jews in whom zeal and religion wretchedly transformed into fanaticism, have inspired so many horrible cruelties."

" Yes," he said. " The Mohammedans were sullied with the same inhumanities, but rarely; and when one asked amman, pity, of them, and offered them tribute, they pardoned. As for the other nations there has not been one right from the existence of the world which has ever made a purely religious war. Follow me now." I followed him.

A little beyond these piles of dead men we found other piles; they were composed of sacks of gold and silver, and each had its label: Substance of the heretics massacred in the eighteenth century, the seventeenth and the sixteenth. And so on in going back: Gold and silver of Americans slaughtered, etc., etc. And all these piles were surmounted with crosses, mitres, croziers, triple crowns studded with precious stones.

" What, my genius! it was then to have these riches that these dead were piled up? "

" Yes, my son."

I wept; and when by my grief I had merited to be led to the end of the green walks, he led me there.

" Contemplate," he said, " the heroes of humanity who were the world's benefactors, and who were all united in banishing from the world, as far as they were able, violence and rapine. Question them."

I ran to the first of the band; h# had a crown on his head, and a little censer in his hand; I humbly asked him his name. " I am Numa Pompilius," he said to me. " I succeeded a brigand, and I had brigands to govern: I taught them virtue and the worship of God; after me they forgot both more than once; I forbade that in the temples there should be any image, because the Deity which animates nature cannot be represented. During my reign the Romans had neither wars nor seditions, and my religion did nothing but good. All the neighbouring peoples came to honour me at my funeral: that happened to no one but me."

I kissed his hand, and I went to the second. He was a fine old man about a hundred years old, clad in a white robe. He put his middle-finger on his mouth, and with the other hand he cast some beans behind him. I recognized Pythagoras. He assured me he had never had a golden thigh, and that he had never been a cock; but that he had governed the Crotoniates with as much justice as Numa governed the Romans, almost at the same time; and that this justice was the rarest and most necessary thing in the world. I learned that the Pythagoreans examined their consciences twice a day. The honest people! how far we are from them! But we who have been nothing but assassins for thirteen hundred years, we say that these wise men were arrogant .

In order to please Pythagoras, I did not say a word to him and I passed to Zarathustra, who was occupied in concentrating the celestial fire in the focus of a concave mirror, in the middle of a hall with a hundred doors which all led to wisdom. (Zarathustra's precepts are called doors, and are a hundred in number.) Over the principal door I read these words which are the precis of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the causists : "When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain."

" Certainly," I said to my genius, "the barbarians who immolated all these victims had never read these beautiful words."

We then saw the Zaleucus, the Thales, the Aniximanders, and all the sages who had sought truth and practised virtue.

When we came to Socrates, I recognized him very quickly by his flat nose. " Well," I said to him, " here you are then among the number of the Almighty's confidants! All the inhabitants of Europe, except the Turks and the Tartars of the Crimea, who know nothing, pronounce your name with respect. It is revered, loved, this great name, to the point that people have wanted to know those of your persecutors. Melitus and Anitus are known because of you, just as Ravaillac is known because of Henry IV.; but I know only this name of Anitus. I do not know precisely who was the scoundrel who calumniated you, and who succeeded in having you condemned to take hemlock."

"Since my adventure," replied Socrates, " I have never thought about that man; but seeing that you make me remember it, I have much pity for him. He was a wicked priest who secretly conducted a business in hides, a trade reputed shameful among us. He sent his two children to my school. The other discipfes taunted them with having a father who was a currier; they were obliged to leave. The irritated father had no rest until he had stirred up all the priests and all the sophists against me. They persuaded the counsel of the five hundred that I was an impious fellow who did not believe that the Moon, Mercury and Mars were gods. Indeed, I used to think, as I think now that there is only one God, master of all nature. The judges handed me over to the poisoner of the republic; he cut short my life by a few days: I died peacefully at the age of seventy; and since that time I pass a happy life withh all these great men whom you see, and of whom I am the least."

After enjoying some time in conversation with Socrates, Ih went forward with my guide into a grove situated above the thickets where all the sages of antiquity seemed to be tasting sweet repose.

I saw a man of gentle, simple countenance, who seemed to me to be about thirty-five years old. From afar he cast compassionate glances on these piles of whitened bones, across which I had had to pass to reach the sages' abode. I was astonished to find his feet swollen and bleeding, his hands likewise, his side pierced, and his ribs flayed with whip cuts. " Good Heavens! " I said to him, " is it possible for a just man, a sage, to be in this state? I have just seen one who was treated in a very hateful way, but there is no comparison between his torture and yours. Wicked priests and wicked judges poisoned him; is it by priests anhd judges that you have been so cruelly assassinated? "

He answered with much courtesy--"Yes."

"And who were these monsters? "

"They were hypocrites."

"Ah! that says everything; I understand by this single word that they must have condemned you to death. Had you then proved to them, as Socrates did, that the Moon was not a goddess, and that Mercury was not a god? "

"No, these planets were not in question. My compatriots did not know at all what a planet is; they were all arrant ignoramuses. Their superstitions were quite different from those of the Greeks."

"You wanted to teach them a new religion, then? "

"Not at all; I said to them simply--' Love God with all your heart and your fellow-creature as yourself, for that is man's whole duty.' Judge if this precept is not as old as the universe; judge if I brought them a new religion. I did not stop telling them that I had come not to destroy the law bitt to fulfil it; I had observed all their rites; circumcised as they all were, baptized as were the most zealous among them, like them I paid the Corban; I observed the Passover as they did, eating standing up a lahmb cooked with lettuces. I and my friends went to pray in the temple; my friends even frequented this temple after my death; in a word, I fulfilled all their laws without a single exception."

"What! these wretches could not even reproach you with swerving from their laws? "

"No, without a doubt."

"Why then did they put you in the condition in which I now see you? "

"What do you expect me to say! they were very arrogant and selfish. They saw that I knew them; they knew that I was making the citizens acquainted with them; they were the stronger; they took away my life: and people like them will always do as much, if they can, to whoever does them too much justice.''

" But did you say nothing, do nothing that could serve them as a pretext? "

"To the wicked everything serves as pretext."

" Did you not say once that you were come not to send peace, but a sword? "

"It is a copyist's error; I told them that I sent peace and not a sword. I have never written anything; what I said can have been changed without evil intention."

" You therefore contributed in no way by your speeches, badly reported, badly interpreted, to these frightful piles of bones which I saw on my road in coming to consult you? "

"It is with horror only that I have seen those who have made themselves guilty oj these murders."

" And these monuments of power and wealth, of pride and avarice, these treasures, these ornaments, these signs of grandeur, which I have seen piled up on the road while I was seeking wisdom, do they come from you? "

"That is impossible; I and my people lived in poverty and meanness: my grandeur was in virtue only."

I was about to beg him to be so good as to tell me just who he was. My guide warned me to do nothing of the sort. h lie told me that I was not made to understand these sublime mysteries. Only did I conjure him to tell me in what true religion consisted. "Have I not already told you? Love God and your fellow-creature as yourself."

" What! if one loves God, one can eat meat on Friday? "

"I always ate what was given me; for I was too poor to give anyone food."

" In loving God, in being just, should one not be rather cautious not to confide all the adventures of one's life to an unknown man?"

"That was always my practice."

" Can I not, by doing good, dispense with making a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella? "

"I have never been in that country."

" Is it necessary for me to imprison myself in a retreat with fools? "

"As for me, I always made little journeys from town to town.''

" Is it necessary for me to take sides either for the Greek Church or the Latin? "

"When I was in the world I never made any difference between the Jew and the Samaritan."

"Well, if that is so, I take you for my only master." Then he made me a sign with his head which filled me with consolation. The vision disappeared, and a clear conscience stayed with me.

[Siblesz]

II. Tolerance in Islam, by Marmaduke Pickthall

One of the commonest charges brought against Islam historically, and as a religion, by Western writers is that it is intolerant. This is turning the tables with a vengeance when one remembers various facts: One remembers that not a Muslim is left alive in Spain or Sicily or Apulia. One remembers that not a Muslim was left alive and not a mosque left standing in Greece after the great rebellion in l821. One remembers how the Muslims of the Balkan peninsula, once the majority, have been systematically reduced with the approval of the whole of Europe, how the Christian under Muslim rule have in recent times been urged on to rebel and massacre the Muslims, and how reprisals by the latter have been condemned as quite uncalled for.

In Spain under the Umayyads and in Baghdad under the Abbasid Khalifas, Christians and Jews, equally with Muslims, were admitted to the Schools and universities - not only that, but were boarded and lodged in hostels at the cost of the state. When the Moors were driven out of Spain, the Christian conquerors held a terrific persecution of the Jews. Those who were fortunate enough to escape fled, some of them to Morocco and many hundreds to the Turkish empire, where their descendants still live in separate communities, and still speak among themselves an antiquated form of Spanish. The Muslim empire was a refuge for all those who fled from persecution by the Inquisition.

The Western Christians, till the arrival of the Encyclopaedists in the eighteenth century, did not know and did not care to know, what the Muslim believed, nor did the Western Christian seek to know the views of Eastern Christians with regard to them. The Christian Church was already split in two, and in the end, it came to such a pass that the Eastern Christians, as Gibbon shows, preferred Muslim rule, which allowed them to practice their own form of religion and adhere to their peculiar dogmas, to the rule of fellow Christians who would have made them Roman Catholics or wiped them out.

The Western Christians called the Muslims pagans, paynims, even idolaters - there are plenty of books in which they are described as worshiping an idol called Mahomet or Mahound, and in the accounts of the conquest of Granada there are even descriptions of the monstrous idols which they were alleged to worship - whereas the Muslims knew what Christianity was, and in what respects it differed from Islam. If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims knew of Christendom, in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally chivalrous and heroic, but utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades could not have taken place, for they were based on a complete misapprehension. I quote a learned French author:

“Every poet in Christendom considered a Mohammedan to be an infidel, and an idolater, and his gods to be three; mentioned in order, they were: Mahomet or Mahound or Mohammad, Opolane and the third Termogond. It was said that when in Spain the Christians overpowered the Mohammadans and drove them as far as the gates of the city of Saragossa, the Mohammadans went back and broke their idols.

“A Christian poet of the period says that Opolane the “god” of the Mohammadans, which was kept there in a den was awfully belaboured and abused by the Mohammadans, who, binding it hand and foot, crucified it on a pillar, trampled it under their feet and broke it to pieces by beating it with sticks; that their second god Mahound they threw in a pit and caused to be torn to pieces by pigs and dogs, and that never were gods so ignominiously treated; but that afterwards the Mohammadans repented of their sins, and once more reinstated their gods for the accustomed worship, and that when the Emperor Charles entered the city of Saragossa he had every mosque in the city searched and had "Muhammad" and all their Gods broken with iron hammers.”

That was the kind of "history" on which the populace in Western Europe used to be fed. Those were the ideas which inspired the rank and file of the crusader in their attacks on the most civilized peoples of those days. Christendom regarded the outside world as damned eternally, and Islam did not. There were good and tender-hearted men in Christendom who thought it sad that any people should be damned eternally, and wished to save them by the only way they knew - conversion to the Christian faith.
It was not until the Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more tolerant; and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that they declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture. Therefore the difference evident in that anecdote is not of manners only but of religion. Of old, tolerance had existed here and there in the world, among enlightened individuals; but those individuals had always been against the prevalent religion. Tolerance was regarded of un-religious, if not irreligious. Before the coming of Islam it had never been preached as an essential part of religion.

For the Muslims, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are but three forms of one religion, which, in its original purity, was the religion of Abraham: Al-Islam, that perfect Self-Surrender to the Will of God, which is the basis of Theocracy. The Jews, in their religion, after Moses, limited God's mercy to their chosen nation and thought of His kingdom as the dominion of their race.

Even Christ himself, as several of his sayings show, declared that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel and seemed to regard his mission as to the Hebrews only; and it was only after a special vision vouchsafed to St. Peter that his followers in after days considered themselves authorized to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. The Christians limited God’s mercy to those who believed certain dogmas. Every one who failed to hold the dogmas was an outcast or a miscreant, to be persecuted for his or her soul’s good. In Islam only is manifest the real nature of the Kingdom of God.

The two verses (2:255-256) of the Qur’an are supplementary. Where there is that realization of the majesty and dominion of Allah (SWT), there is no compulsion in religion. Men choose their path - allegiance or opposition - and it is sufficient punishment for those who oppose that they draw further and further away from the light of truth.

What Muslims do not generally consider is that this law applies to our own community just as much as to the folk outside, the laws of Allah being universal; and that intolerance of Muslims for other men's opinions and beliefs is evidence that they themselves have, at the moment, forgotten the vision of the majesty and mercy of Allah (SWT) which the Qur’an presents to them.

In the Qur’an I find two meanings (of a Kafir), which become one the moment that we try to realize the divine standpoint. The Kafir in the first place, is not the follower of any religion. He is the opponent of Allah’s benevolent will and purpose for mankind - therefore the disbeliever in the truth of all religions, the disbeliever in all Scriptures as of divine revelation, the disbeliever to the point of active opposition in all the Prophets (pbuh) whom the Muslims are bidden to regard, without distinction, as messengers of Allah.

The Qur’an repeatedly claims to be the confirmation of the truth of all religions. The former Scriptures had become obscure, the former Prophets appeared mythical, so extravagant were the legends which were told concerning them, so that people doubted whether there was any truth in the old Scriptures, whether such people as the Prophets had ever really existed. Here - says the Qur’an - is a Scripture whereof there is no doubt: here is a Prophet actually living among you and preaching to you. If it were not for this book and this Prophet, men might be excused for saying that Allah’s guidance to mankind was all a fable. This book and this Prophet, therefore, confirm the truth of all that was revealed before them, and those who disbelieve in them to the point of opposing the existence of a Prophet and a revelation are really opposed to the idea of Allah's guidance - which is the truth of all revealed religions. Our Holy Prophet (pbuh) himself said that the term Kafir was not to be applied to anyone who said “Salam” (peace) to the Muslims. The Kafirs, in the terms of the Qur’an, are the conscious evil-doers of any race of creed or community.

I have made a long digression but it seemed to me necessary, for I find much confusion of ideas even among Muslims on this subject, owing to defective study of the Qur’an and the Prophet's life. Many Muslims seem to forget that our Prophet had allies among the idolaters even after Islam had triumphed in Arabia, and that he “fulfilled his treaty with them perfectly until the term thereof.” The righteous conduct of the Muslims, not the sword, must be held responsible for the conversion of those idolaters, since they embraced Islam before the expiration of their treaty.

So much for the idolaters of Arabia, who had no real beliefs to oppose the teaching of Islam, but only superstition. They invoked their local deities for help in war and put their faith only in brute force. In this they were, to begin with, enormously superior to the Muslims. When the Muslims nevertheless won, they were dismayed; and all their arguments based on the superior power of their deities were for ever silenced. Their conversion followed naturally. It was only a question of time with the most obstinate of them.

It was otherwise with the people who had a respectable religion of their own - the People of the Scripture - as the Qur’an calls them - i.e, the people who had received the revelation of some former Prophet: the Jews, the Christians and the Zoroastrians were those with whom the Muslims came at once in contact. To these our Prophet's attitude was all of kindness. The Charter which he granted to the Christian monks of Sinai is extant. If you read it you will see that it breathes not only goodwill but actual love. He gave to the Jews of Medina, so long as they were faithful to him, precisely the same treatment as to the Muslims. He never was aggressive against any man or class of men; he never penalized any man, or made war on any people, on the ground of belief but only on the ground of conduct.

The story of his reception of Christian and Zoroastrian visitors is on record. There is not a trace of religious intolerance in all this. And it should be remembered - Muslims are rather apt to forget it, and it is of great importance to our outlook - that our Prophet did not ask the people of the Scripture to become his followers. He asked them only to accept the Kingdom of Allah, to abolish priesthood and restore their own religions to their original purity. The question which, in effect, he put to everyone was this: “Are you for the Kingdom of God which includes all of us, or are you for your own community against the rest of mankind?” The one is obviously the way of peace and human progress, the other the way of strife, oppression and calamity. But the rulers of the world, to whom he sent his message, most of them treated it as the message of either an insolent upstart or a mad fanatic. His envoys were insulted cruelly, and even slain. One cannot help wondering what reception that same embassy would meet with from the rulers of mankind today, when all the thinking portion of mankind accept the Prophet's premises, have thrown off the trammels of priestcraft, and harbour some idea of human brotherhood.

But though the Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians refused his message, and their rulers heaped most cruel insults on his envoys, our Prophet never lost his benevolent attitudes towards them as religious communities; as witness the Charter to the monks of Sinai already mentioned. And though the Muslims of later days have fallen far short of the Holy Prophet's tolerance, and have sometimes shown arrogance towards men of other faiths, they have always given special treatment to the Jews and Christians. Indeed the Laws for their special treatment form part of the Shari'ah.

In Egypt the Copts were on terms of closest friendship with the Muslims in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and they are on terms at closest friendship with the Muslims at the present day. In Syria the various Christian communities lived on terms of closest friendship with the Muslims in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and they are on terms of closest friendship with the Muslims at the present day, openly preferring Muslim domination to a foreign yoke.

There were always flourishing Jewish communities in the Muslim realm, notably in Spain, North Africa, Syria, Iraq and later on in Turkey. Jews fled from Christian persecution to Muslim countries for refuge. Whole communities of them voluntarily embraced Islam following a revered rabbi whom they regarded as the promised Messiah but many more remained as Jews, and they were never persecuted as in Christendom. The Turkish Jews are one with the Turkish Muslims today. And it is noteworthy that the Arabic-speaking Jews of Palestine - the old immigrants from Spain and Poland - are one with the Muslims and Christians in opposition to the transformation of Palestine into a national home for the Jews.

To turn to the Christians, the story of the triumphal entry of the Khalifah Umar ibn al-Khattab (ra) into Jerusalem has been often told, but I shall tell it once again, for it illustrates the proper Muslim attitude towards the People of the Scripture. ...The Christian officials urged him to spread his carpet in the Church (of the Holy Sepulchre) itself, but he refused saying that some of the ignorant Muslims after him might claim the Church and convert it into a mosque because he had once prayed there. He had his carpet carried to the top of the steps outside the church, to the spot where the Mosque of Umar now stands - the real Mosque of Umar, for the splendid Qubbet-us-Sakhrah, which tourists call the Mosque of Umar, is not a Mosque at all, but the temple of Jerusalem; a shrine within the precincts of the Masjid-al-Aqsa, which is the second of the Holy Places of Islam.

From that day to this; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has always been a Christian place of worship, the only things the Muslims did in the way of interference with the Christian's liberty of conscience in respect of it was to see that every sect of Christians had access to it, and that it was not monopolized by one sect to the exclusion of others. The same is true of the Church of the Nativity of Bethlehem, and of other buildings of special sanctity.

Under the Khulafa-ur-Rashidin and the Umayyads, the true Islamic attitude was maintained, and it continued to a much later period under the Umayyad rule in Spain. In those days it was no uncommon thing for Muslims and Christian to use the same places of worship. I could point to a dozen buildings in Syria which tradition says were thus conjointly used; and I have seen at Lud (Lydda), in the plain of Sharon, a Church of St. George and a mosque under the same roof with only a partition wall between. The partition wall did not exist in early days. The words of the Khalifah Umar proved true in other cases; not only half the church at Lydda, but the whole church in other places was claimed by ignorant Muslims of a later day on the mere ground that the early Muslims had prayed there. But there was absolute liberty of conscience for the Christians; they kept their most important Churches and built new ones; though by a later edict their church bells were taken from them because their din annoyed the Muslims, it was said; only the big bell of the Holy Sepulchre remaining. They used to call to prayer by beating a naqus, a wooden gong, the same instrument which the Prophet Noah (pbuh) is said to have used to summon the chosen few into his ark.

It was not the Christians of Syria who desired the Crusades, nor did the Crusades care a jot for them, or their sentiments, regarding them as heretics and interlopers. The latter word sounds strange in this connection, but there is a reason for its use.

The great Abbasid Khalifah Harun ar-Rashid had, God knows why, once sent the keys of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre among other presents to the Frankish Emperor, Charlemagne. Historically, it was a wrong to the Christians of Syria, who did not belong to the Western Church, and asked for no protection other than the Muslim government. Politically, it was a mistake and proved the source of endless after trouble to the Muslim Empire. The keys sent, it is true, were only duplicate keys. The Church was in daily use. It was not locked up till such time as Charlemagne, Emperor of the West, chose to lock it. The present of the keys was intended only as a compliment, as one would say: “You and your people can have free access to the Church which is the centre of your faith, your goal of pilgrimage, whenever you may come to visit it.” But the Frankish Christians took the present seriously in after times regarding it as the title to a freehold, and looking on the Christians of the country as mere interlopers, as I said before, as well as heretics.

That compliment from king to king was the foundation of all the extravagant claims of France in later centuries. Indirectly it was the foundation of Russia's even more extortionate claims, for Russia claimed to protect the Eastern Church against the encroachment of Roman Catholics; and it was the cause of nearly all the ill feeling which ever existed between the Muslims and their Christians Dhimmis.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem they massacred the Eastern Christians with the Muslims indiscriminately, and while they ruled in Palestine the Eastern Christians, such of them as did not accompany the retreating Muslim army, were deprived of all the privileges which Islam secured to them and were treated as a sort of outcasts. Many of them became Roman Catholics in order to secure a higher status; but after the re-conquest, when the emigrants returned, the followers of the Eastern church were found again to be in large majority over those who owed obedience to the Pope of Rome. The old order was re-established and all the Dhimmis once again enjoyed their privileges in accordance with the Sacred Law (of Islam).

But the effect of those fanatical inroads had been somewhat to embitter Muslim sentiments, and to tinge them with an intellectual contempt for the Christian generally; which was bad for Muslims and for Christians both; since it made the former arrogant and oppressive to the latter socially, and the intellectual contempt, surviving the intellectual superiority, blinded the Muslims to the scientific advance of the West till too late.

The arrogance hardened into custom, and when Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt occupied Syria in the third decade of the nineteenth century, a deputation of the Muslims of Damascus waited on him with a complaint that under his rule the Christians were beginning to ride on horseback. Ibrahim Pasha pretended to be greatly shocked at the news, and asked leave to think for a whole night on so disturbing an announcement. Next morning, he informed the deputation that since it was, of course, a shame for Christians to ride as high as Muslims, he gave permission to all Muslims thenceforth to ride on camels. That was probably the first time that the Muslims of Damascus had ever been brought face to face with the absurdity of their pretensions.

By the beginning of the Eighteenth century AD, the Christians had, by custom, been made subject to certain social disabilities, but these were never, at the worst, so cruel or so galling as those to which the Roman Catholic nobility of France at the same period subjected their own Roman Catholic peasantry, or as those which Protestants imposed on Roman Catholics in Ireland; and they weighed only on the wealthy portion of the community. The poor Muslims and poor Christians were on an equality, and were still good friends and neighbours.

The Muslims never interfered with the religion of the subject Christians. There was never anything like the Inquisition or the fires of Smithfield. Nor did they interfere in the internal affairs of their communities. Thus a number of small Christian sects, called by the larger sects heretical, which would inevitably have been exterminated if left to the tender mercies of the larger sects whose power prevailed in Christendom, were protected and preserved until today by the power of Islam.

Innumerable monasteries, with a wealth of treasure of which the worth has been calculated at not less than a hundred millions sterling, enjoyed the benefit of the Holy Prophet's Charter to the monks of Sinai and were religiously respected by the Muslims. The various sects of Christians were represented in the Council of the Empire by their patriarchs, on the provincial and district council by their bishops, in the village council by their priests, whose word was always taken without question on things which were the sole concern of their community.

With regard to the respect for monasteries, I have a curious instance of my own remembrance. In the year 1905 the Arabic congregation of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or Church of the Resurrection as it is locally called, rebelled against the tyranny of the Monks of the adjoining convent of St. George. The convent was extremely rich, and a large part of its revenues was derived from lands which had been made over to it by the ancestors of the Arab congregation for security at a time when property was insecure; relying on the well known Muslim reverence for religious foundations. The income was to be paid to the depositors and their descendants, after deducting something for the convent.

No income had been paid to anybody by the Monks for more than a century, and the congregation now demanded that at least a part of that ill-gotten wealth should be spent on education of the community. The Patriarch sided with the congregation, but was captured by the Monks, who kept him prisoner. The congregation tried to storm the convent, and the amiable monk poured vitriol down upon the faces of the congregation. The congregation appealed to the Turkish government, which secured the release of the Patriarch and some concessions for the congregation, but could not make the monks disgorge any part of their wealth because of the immunities secured to Monasteries by the Sacred Law (of Islam). What made the congregation the more bitter was the fact that certain Christians who, in old days, had made their property over to the Masjid al-Aqsa - the great mosque of Jerusalem - for security, were receiving income yearly from it even then.

Here is another incident from my own memory. A sub prior of the Monastery of St. George purloined a handful from the enormous treasure of the Holy Sepulchre - a handful worth some forty thousand pounds - and tried to get away with it to Europe. He was caught at Jaffa by the Turkish customs officers and brought back to Jerusalem. The poor man fell on his face before the Mutasarrif imploring him with tears to have him tried by Turkish Law. The answer was: "We have no jurisdiction over monasteries," and the poor grovelling wretch was handed over to the tender mercies of his fellow monks.

But the very evidence of their toleration, the concessions given to the subject people of another faith, were used against them in the end by their political opponents just as the concessions granted in their day of strength to foreigners came to be used against them in their day of weakness, as capitulations.

I can give you one curious instance of a capitulation, typical of several others. Three hundred years ago, the Franciscan friars were the only Western European missionaries to be found in the Muslim Empire. There was a terrible epidemic of plague, and those Franciscans worked devotedly, tending the sick and helping to bury the dead of all communities. In gratitude for this great service, the Turkish government decreed that all property of the Franciscans should be free of customs duty for ever. In the Firman (Edict) the actual words used were "Frankish missionaries" and at later time, when there were hundreds of missionaries from the West, most of them of other sects than the Roman Catholic, they all claimed that privilege and were allowed it by the Turkish government because the terms of the original Firman included them. Not only that, but they claimed that concession as a right, as if it had been won for them by force of arms or international treaty instead of being, as it was, a free gift of the Sultan; and called upon their consuls and ambassadors to support them But if it was at all infringed.

The Christians were allowed to keep their own languages and customs, to start their own schools and to be visited by missionaries to their own faith from Christendom. Thus they formed patches of nationalism in a great mass of internationalism or universal brotherhood; for as I have already said the tolerance within the body of Islam was, and is, something without parallel in history; class and race and colour ceasing altogether to be barriers.

In countries where nationality and language were the same in Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia there was no clash of ideals, but in Turkey, where the Christians spoke quite different languages from the Muslims, the ideals were also different. So long as the nationalism was not aggressive, all went well; and it remained non-aggressive - that is to say, the subject Christians were content with their position - so long as the Muslim Empire remained better governed, more enlightened and more prosperous than Christian countries. And that may be said to have been the case, in all human essentials, up to the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Then for a period of about eighty years the Turkish Empire was badly governed; and the Christians suffered not from Islamic Institutions but from the decay or neglect of Islamic Institutions. Still it took Russia more than a century of ceaseless secret propaganda work to stir ups spirit of aggressive nationalism in the subject Christians, and then only by appealing to their religious fanaticism.

After the eighty years of bad government came the era of conscious reform, when the Muslim government turned its attention to the improvement of the status of all the peoples under it. But then it was too late to win back the Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgars and the Romans. The poison of the Russian religious-political propaganda had done its work, and the prestige of Russian victories over the Turks had excited in the worst elements among the Christians of the Greek Church, the hope of an early opportunity to slaughter and despoil the Muslims, strengthening the desire to do so which had been instilled in them by Russian secret envoys, priests and monks.

I do not wish to dwell upon this period of history, though it is to me the best known of all, for it is too recent and might rouse too strong a feeling in my audience. I will only remind you that in the Greek War of Independence in 1811, three hundred thousand Muslims - men and women and children - the whole Muslim population of the Morea without exception, as well as many thousands in the northern parts of Greece - were wiped out in circumstances of the most atrocious cruelty; that in European histories we seldom find the slightest mention of that massacre, though we hear much of the reprisals which the Turks took afterwards; that before every massacre of Christians by Muslims of which you read, there was a more wholesale massacre or attempted massacre of Muslims by Christians; that those Christians were old friends and neighbours of the Muslims - the Armenians were the favourites of the Turks till fifty years ago - and that most of them were really happy under Turkish rule, as has been shown again and again by their tendency to return to it after so called liberation.

It was the Christians outside the Muslim Empire who systematically and continually fed their religious fanaticism: it was their priests who told them that to slaughter Muslims was a meritorious act. I doubt if anything so wicked can be found in history as that plot for the destruction of Turkey. When I say “wicked,” I mean inimical to human progress and therefore against Allah's guidance and His purpose for mankind. For it has made religious tolerance appear a weakness in the eyes of all the worldl, because the multitudes of Christians who lived peacefully in Turkey are made to seem the cause of Turkey's martyrdom and downfall; while on the other hand the method of persecution and extermination which has always prevailed in Christendom is made to seem comparatively strong and wise.

Thus religious tolerance is made to seem a fault, politically. But it is not really so. The victims of injustice are always less to be pitied in reality than the perpetrators of injustice.

From the expulsion of the Moriscos dates the degradation and decline of Spain. San Fernando was really wiser and more patriotic in his tolerance to conquered Seville, Murcia and Toledo than was the later king who, under the guise of Holy warfare, captured Grenada and let the Inquisition work its will upon the Muslims and the Jews. And the modern Balkan States and Greece are born under a curse. It may even prove that the degradation and decline of European civilization will be dated from the day when so-called civilized statesmen agreed to the inhuman policy of Czarist Russia and gave their sanction to the crude fanaticism of the Russian Church.

There is no doubt but that, in the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of culture in a people. Let no Muslim, when looking on the ruin of the Muslim realm which was compassed through the agency of those very peoples whom the Muslims had tolerated and protected through the centuries when Western Europe thought it a religious duty to exterminate or forcibly convert all peoples of another faith than theirs - let no Muslim, seeing this, imagine that toleration is a weakness in Islam. It is the greatest strength of Islam because it is the attitude of truth.

Allah is not the God of the Jews or the Christians or the Muslims only, any more than the sun shines or the rain falls for Jews or Christians or Muslims only.

[Siblesz]

III. Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor

HER DOCTOR had told Julian's mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.

She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn't have paid that for it. No, I shouldn't have. I'll take it off and return it tomorrow. I shouldn't have bought it.”

Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let's go.” It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl that he had to take to town. “It's all right, it's all right,” he said. “Let's go.” He opened door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed with the determination to make himself completely numb during the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.

The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming toward him. “Well,” she said, “you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at least won't meet myself coming and going.”

“Some day I'll start making money,” Julian said gloomily- he knew he never would - “and you can have one of those jokes whenever you take the fit.” But first they would move. He visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles away on either side.

“I think you're doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “You've only been out of school a year. Rome wasn't built in a day.”

She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son who had been to college. “It takes time,” she said, “and the world is in such a mess. This hat looked better on me than any of the others, though when she brought it out I said, ‘Take that thing back. I wouldn't have it on my head,’ and she said, ‘Now wait till you see it on,’ and when she put it on me, I said, ‘We-ull,’ and she said, ‘If you ask me, that hat does something for you and you do something for the hat, and besides,’ she said, ‘with that hat, you won't meet yourself coming and going.’”

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching sight of his long, hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,” she said. “I'm going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I'm going to return it. I was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty.”

He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not going to take it back,” he said. “I like it.”
“Well,” she said, “I don't think I ought. . .”
“Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depressed than ever.
“With the world in the mess it's in,” she said, “it's a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.” Julian sighed.
“Of course,” she said, “if you know who you are, you can go anywhere.” She said this every time he took her to the reducing class. “Most of them in it are not our kind of people,” she said, “but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.”
“They don't give a damn for your graciousness,” Julian said savagely. “Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.”

She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. “I most certainly do know who I am,” she said, “and if you don't know who you are, I'm ashamed of you.”
“Oh hell,” Julian said.
“Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,” she said. “Your grandfather was a prosperous land-owner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh.”
“Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.
“You remain what you are,” she said. “Your great-grand-father had a plantation and two hundred slaves.”
“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.
“They were better off when they were,” she said.

He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roil majestically into the station: “It's ridiculous. It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”
“Let's skip it,” Julian said.
“The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are half white. They're tragic.”
“Will you skip it?”
“Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have mixed feelings.”
“I have mixed feelings now,” he groaned.
“Well let's talk about something pleasant,” she said. “I remember going to Grandpa's when I was a little girl. Then the house had double stairways that went up to what was really the second floor - all the cooking was done on the first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on account of the way the walls smelled. I would sit with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep breaths. Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your grandfather Chestny paid the mortgage and saved it for them. They were in reduced circumstances,” she said, “but reduced or not, they never forgot who they were.”

“Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,” Julian muttered. He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing. He had seen it once when he was a child before it had been sold. The double stairways had rotted and been torn down. Negroes were living in it. But it remained in his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams regularly. He would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of oak leaves, then wander through the high-ceilinged hall into the parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that it was he, not she, who could have appreciated it. He preferred its threadbare elegance to anything he could name and it was because of it that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a torment to him - whereas she had hardly known the difference. She called her insensitivity “being adjustable.”

“And I remember the old darky who was my nurse, Caroline. There was no better person in the world. I've always had a great respect for my colored friends,” she said. “I’d do anything in the world for them and they'd. . .”

“Will you for God's sake get off that subject?” Julian said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother's sins.
“You're mighty touchy tonight,” she said. “Do you feel all right?”
“Yes I feel all right” he said. “Now lay off.”
She pursed her lips. “Well, you certainly are in a vile humor,” she observed “I just won't speak to you at all.”

They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket.

She stiffened. “Why must you look like that when you take me to town?” she said. “Why must you deliberately embarrass me?”
“If you'll never learn where you arc,” he said, “you can at least learn where I am.”
“You look like a thug,” she said.
“Then I must be one” he murmured.
“I'll just go home” she said. “I will not bother you. If you can’t do a little thing’ like that for me . . .”
Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. “Restored to my class,” he muttered. He thrust his face toward her and hissed, “True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.”
“It's in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.”
“Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.”
“I care who I am” she said icily.

The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as it approached, they moved out into the street to meet it. He put his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up On the creaking step. She entered with a little smile, as if she were going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her. While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one of the broad front seats for three which faced the aisle. A thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair was sitting on the end of it. His mother moved up beside her and left room for Julian beside herself. He sat down and looked at the floor across the aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas sandals were planted.

His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. “Can it get any hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a folding fan, black with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter before her.
“I reckon it might could,” the woman with the protruding teeth said, “but I know for a fact my apartment couldn’t get no hotter.”
“It must get the afternoon sun, " his mother said. She sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. “I see we have the bus to ourselves,” she said. Julian cringed.
“For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the owner of the red and white canvas sandals. “I come on one the other day and they were thick as fleas - up front and all through.”
“The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said. “I don't know how we’ve let it get in this fix.”
“What gets my goat is all those boys from good families stealing automobile tires,” the woman with the protruding teeth said. “I told my boy, I said you may not be rich but you been raised right and if I ever catch you in any such mess, they can send you on to the reformatory. Be exactly where you belong.”
“Training tells,” his mother said. “Is your boy in high school?”
“Ninth grade,” the woman said.
“My son just finished college last year. He wants to write but he’s selling typewriters until he gets started,” his mother said.
The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He threw her such a malevolent look that she subsided against the seat. On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned newspaper. He got up and got it and opened it out in front of him. His mother discreetly continued the conversation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud voice, “Well that’s nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go right from one to the other.”
“I tell him,” his mother said, “that Rome wasn't built in a day.”

Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.

The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she had started from any of the right premises, more might have been expected of her. She lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world outside of which he had never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things. If he had permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight had made them necessary. All of her life had been a struggle to act like a Chestny and to give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to have without the goods a Chestny ought to have; but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on the hard times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought she had won.

What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought him up successfully and had sent him to college and that he had turned out so well-good looking (her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to be a success), and with a future ahead of him (there was of course no future ahead of him). She excused his gloominess on the grounds that he was still growing up and his radical ideas on his lack of practical experience. She said he didn’t yet know a thing about “life,” that he hadn’t even entered the real world - when already he was as disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.

The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he had turned out so well. In spite of going to only a third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a first-rate education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her foolish views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated by his mother.

The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from his meditation. A woman from the back lurched forward with little steps and barely escaped falling in his newspaper as she righted herself. She got off and a large Negro got on. Julian kept his paper lowered to watch. It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles. The Negro was well dressed and carried a briefcase. He looked around and then sat down on the other end of the seat where the woman with the red and white canvas sandals was sitting. He immediately unfolded a newspaper and obscured himself behind it. Julianís mother's elbow at once prodded insistently into his ribs. “Now you see why I won't ride on these buses by myself,” she whispered.

The woman with the red and white canvas sandals had risen at the same time the Negro sat down and had gone farther back in the bus and taken the seat of the woman who had got off His mother leaned forward and cast her an approving look.

Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the place of the woman with the canvas sandals. From this position, he looked serenely across at his mother. Her face had turned an angry red. He stared at her, making his eyes the eyes of a stranger. He felt his tension suddenly lift as if he had openly declared war on her.

He would have liked to get in conversation with the Negro and to talk with him about art or politics or any subject that would be above the comprehension of those around them, but the man remained entrenched behind his paper. He was either ignoring the change of seating or had never noticed it. There was no way for Julian to convey his sympathy.

His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face. The woman with the protruding teeth was looking at him avidly as if he were a type of monster new to her.

“Do you have a light?” he asked the Negro.
Without looking away from his paper, the man reached in his pocket and handed him a packet of matches.
“Thanks,” Julian said. For a moment he held the matches foolishly. A NO SMOKING sign looked down upon him from over the door. This alone would not have deterred him; he had no cigarettes. He had quit smoking some months before because he could not afford it. “Sorry,” he muttered and handed back the matches. The Negro lowered the paper and gave him an annoyed look. He took the matches and raised the paper again.

His mother continued to gaze at him but she did not take advantage of his momentary discomfort. Her eyes retained their battered look. Her face seemed to be unnaturally red, as if her blood pressure had risen. Julian allowed no glimmer of sympathy to show on his face. Having got the advantage, he wanted desperately to keep it and carry it through. He would have liked to teach her a lesson that would last her a while, but there seemed no way to continue the point. The Negro refused to come out from behind his paper.

Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him, facing her but as if he did not see her, as if he had ceased to recognize her existence. He visualized a scene in which, the bus having reached their stop, he would remain in his seat and when she said, “Aren’t you going to get off?” he would look at her as at a stranger who had rashly addressed him. The corner they got off on was usually deserted, but it was well lighted and it would not hurt her to walk by herself the four blocks to the Y. He decided to wait until the time came and then decide whether or not he would let her get off by herself He would have to be at the Y at ten to bring her back, but he could leave her wondering if he was going to show up. There was no reason for her to think she could always depend on him.

He retired again into the high-ceilinged room sparsely set-tled with large pieces of antique furniture. His soul expanded momentarily but then he became aware of his mother across from him and the vision shriveled. He studied her coldly. Her feet in little pumps dangled like a child’s and did not quite reach the floor. She was training on him an exaggerated look of reproach. He felt completely detached from her. At that moment he could with pleasure have slapped her as he would have slapped a particularly obnoxious child in his charge.

He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he could teach her a lesson. He might make friends with some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the evening. He would be entirely justified but her blood pressure would rise to 300. He could not push her to the extent of making her have a stroke, and moreover, he had never been successful at making any Negro friends. He had tried to strike up an acquaintance on the bus with some of the better types, with ones that looked like professors or min-isters or lawyers. One morning he had sat down next to a distinguished-looking dark brown man who had answered his questions with a sonorous solemnity but who had turned out to be an undertaker. Another day he had sat down beside a cigar-smoking Negro with a diamond ring on his finger, but after a few stilted pleasantries, the Negro had rung the buzzer and risen, slipping two lottery tickets into Julian's hand as he climbed over him to leave.

He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his being able to secure only a Negro doctor for her. He toyed with that idea for a few minutes and then dropped it for a momentary vision of himself participating as a sympathizer in a sit-in demonstration. This was possible but he did not linger with it. Instead, he approached the ultimate horror. He brought home a beautiful suspiciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he said. There is nothing you can do about it. This is the woman I've chosen. She’s intelligent, dignified, even good, and she’s suffered and she hasn’t thought it fun. Now persecute us, go ahead and persecute us. Drive her out of here, but remember, you’re driving me too. His eyes were narrowed and through the indignation he had generated, he saw his mother across the aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to the dwarf-like proportions of her moral nature, sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her hat.

He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus stopped. The door opened with a sucking hiss and out of the dark a large, gaily dressed, sullen-looking colored woman got on with a little boy. The child, who might have been four, had on a short plaid suit and a Tyrolean hat with a blue feather in it. Julian hoped that he would sit down beside him and that the woman would push in beside his mother. He could think of no better arrangement.

As she waited for her tokens, the woman was surveying the seating possibilities - he hoped with the idea of sitting where she was least wanted. There was something familiar-looking about her but Julian could not place what it was. She was a giant of a woman. Her face was set not only to meet opposition but to seek it out. The downward tilt of her large lower lip was like a warning sign: DON’T TAMPER WITH ME. Her bulging figure was encased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She had on a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. She carried a mammoth red pocketbook that bulged throughout as if it were stuffed with rocks.

To Julian's disappointment, the little boy climbed up on the empty seat beside his mother. His mother lumped all children, black and white, into the common category, “cute,” and she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than little white children. She smiled at the little boy as he climbed on the seat.

Meanwhile the woman was bearing down upon the empty seat beside Julian. To his annoyance, she squeezed herself into it. He saw his mother's face change as the woman settled herself next to him and he realized with satisfaction that this was more objectionable to her than it was to him. Her face seemed almost gray and there was a look of dull recognition in her eyes, as if suddenly she had sickened at some awful confrontation. Julian saw that it was because she and the woman had, in a sense, swapped sons. Though his mother would not realize the symbolic significance of this, she would feel it. His amusement showed plainly on his face.

The woman next to him muttered something unintelligible to herself He was conscious of a kind of bristling next to him, a muted growling like that of an angry cat. He could not see anything but the red pocketbook upright on the bulg-ing green thighs. He visualized the woman as she had stood waiting for her tokens-the ponderous figure, rising from the red shoes upward over the solid hips, the mammoth bosom, the haughty face, to the green and purple hat.

His eyes widened.
The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with the radiance of a brilliant sunrise. His face was suddenly lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so that she would look at him and see that he saw. She turned her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense of her innocence, but it lasted only a second before principle rescued him. Justice entitled him to laugh. His grin hardened until it said to her as plainly as if he were saying aloud: Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you a permanent lesson.

Her eyes shifted to the woman. She seemed unable to bear looking at him and to find the woman preferable. He became conscious again of the bristling presence at his side. The woman was rumbling like a volcano about to become active. His mother's mouth began to twitch slightly at one corner. With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her face and realized that this was going to strike her suddenly as funny and was going to be no lesson at all. She kept her eyes on the woman and an amused smile came over her face as if the woman were a monkey that had stolen her hat. The little Negro was looking up at her with large fascinated eyes. He had been trying to attract her attention for some time.

“Carver!” the woman said suddenly. “Come heah!”
When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last, Carver drew his feet up and turned himself toward Julianís mother and giggled.
“Carver!” the woman said. “You heah me? Come heah!”

Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting with his back against the base of it, his head turned slyly around toward Julian's mother, who was smiling at him. The woman reached a hand across the aisle and snatched him to her. He righted himself and hung backwards on her knees, grinning at Julian's mother. “Isn’t he cute?” Julian's mother said to the woman with the protruding teeth.

“I reckon he is,” the woman said without conviction.
The Negress yanked him upright but he eased out of her grip and shot across the aisle and scrambled, giggling wildly, onto the seat beside his love.
“I think he likes me,” Julian's mother said, and smiled at the woman. It was the smile she used when she was being particularly gracious to an inferior. Julian saw everything lost. The lesson had rolled off her like rain on a roof.

The woman stood up and yanked the little boy off the seat as if she were snatching him from contagion. Julian could feel the rage in her at having no weapon like his mother's smile. She gave the child a sharp slap across his leg. He howled once and then thrust his head into her stomach and kicked his fret against her shins. “Be-have,” she said vehemently.

The bus stopped and the Negro who had been reading the newspaper got off. The woman moved over and set the little boy down with a thump between herself and Julian. She held him firmly by the knee. In a moment he put his hands in front of his face and peeped at Julian's mother through his fingers.

“I see yoooooooo !” she said and put her hand in front of her face and peeped at him.
The woman slapped his hand down. “Quit yo’ foolishness,” she said, “before I knock the living Jesus out of you!”

Julian was thankful that the next stop was theirs. He reached up and pulled the cord. The woman reached up and pulled it at the same time. Oh my God, he thought. He had the terrible intuition that when they got off the bus together, his mother would open her purse and give the little boy a nickel. The gesture would be as natural to her as breathing. The bus stopped and the woman got up and lunged to the front, dragging the child, who wished to stay on, after her. in and his mother got up and followed. As they neared e door, Julian tried to relieve her of her pocketbook.

“No,” she murmured, “I want to give the little boy a nickel.”
“No!” Julian hissed. “No!”
She smiled down at the child and opened her bag. The bus door opened and the woman picked him up by the arm and descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once in the street she set him down and shook him.

Julian's mother had to close her purse while she got down the bus step but as soon as her feet were on the ground, she opened it again and began to rummage inside. “I can’t find but a penny,” she whispered, “but it looks like a new one.”

“Don’t do it!” Julian said fiercely between his teeth. There was a streetlight on the corner and she hurried to get under it so that she could better see into her pocketbook. The woman was heading off rapidly down the street with the child still hanging backward on her hand.

“Oh little boy!” Julian's mother called and took a few quick steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamppost. “Here’s a bright new penny for you,” and she held out the coin, which shone bronze in the dim light.

The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and stared at Julianís mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, “He don't take nobody’s pennies!” When he opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julianís mother was sitting on the sidewalk.

“I told you not to do that,” Julian said angrily. “I told you not to do that!”
He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her legs were stretched out in front of her and her hat was on her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the face. It was totally expressionless. “You got exactly what you deserved,” he said. “Now get up.”

He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen out back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny caught his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and let it drop before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up and leaned over and held his hands out to pull her up. She remained immobile. He sighed. Rising above them on either side were black apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light. At the end of the block a man came out of a door and walked off in the opposite direction. “All right,” he said, “suppose somebody happens by and wants to know why you’re sitting on the sidewalk?”

She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily up on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly as if the spots of light in the darkness were circling around her. Her eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled on his face. He did not try to conceal his irritation. “I hope this teaches you a lesson,” he said. She leaned forward and her eyes raked his face. She seemed trying to determine his identity. Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him, she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong direction.
“Aren’t you going on to the Y?” he asked.
“Home,” she muttered.
“Well, are we walking?”

For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. “Don’t think that was just an uppity Negro woman,” he said. “That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren’t who you think you are,” he said.

She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to him. Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it up and handed it to her but she did not take it.
”You needn’t act as if the world had come to an end,” he said, “because it hasn’t. From now on you’ve got to live in a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up,” he said, “it won't kill you.”
She was breathing fast.
“Let's wait on the bus,” he said.
“Home,” she said thickly.
“I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like a child. I should be able to expect more of you.” He decided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus. “I'm not going any farther,” he said, stopping. “We’re going on the bus.”

She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her. He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was looking into a face he had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa to come get me,” she said.
He stared, stricken.
“Tell Caroline to come get me,” she said.

Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.

“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

[Siblesz]

IX. Part I of Saint Manuel, the Good Martyr by Miguel de Unamuno
Translated from Spanish by Nancy Mayberry

Now that the bishop of the diocese of Renata, to which my village of Valverde de Lucerna belongs, is going about, so they say, beginning the process for the beatification of our Don Manuel, or rather, Saint Manuel the Good, who used to be our parish priest, I want to leave written here, by way of confession, (and only God knows and not I what fate it may have), everything that I know and remember about that motherly male who filled the most intimate part of my life and soul, who was my true spiritual father, the father of my soul, of myself, Angela Carballino.

The other one, my flesh and temporal father, I scarcely knew, since he died when I was very young. I know that he had arrived in our Valverde de Lucerna as a stranger, that he settled here upon marrying my mother. He brought with him some few books, the Quixote, works of classical theater, some historical novels, histories, the Bertoldo, all mixed up, and as a daydreaming child I devoured those books, almost the only ones in the whole village. My good mother scarcely told me any facts or sayings of my father. Those of Don Manuel, whom like the whole village she adored, with whom she was in love- of course most chastely- had wiped out the very memory of those of her husband. Each day, on praying the rosary, she fervently commended him to God.

I remember our Don Manuel as if it were yesterday, when I was a child of ten, before they took me off to the religious school in the cathedral city of Renada. Our priest was probably about thirty seven years old then. He was tall, thin, erect, and carried his head like our Buitre Peak carries its crest, and there was in his eyes the blueish depth of our lake. He attracted the glance of everybody, and after that, their hearts, and he, upon looking at us, seemed to look straight through our flesh like glass, to look at our hearts. We all loved him, but especially the children. What things he told us! They were things, not words. The town began to reek of holiness; one felt full and drunk with its aroma.

It was then that my brother Lazaro, who was in America from where he regularly sent us money so that we might live in seemly comfort, made my mother send me to the religious school, so that I might complete my education outside of the village. And this, even though he didn’t think much of nuns. “But since there”, he wrote us, “there are no progressive lay schools as far as I know, and even fewer for girls, one must make do with what there is. The important thing is that Angelita be polished and not continue among the crude village girls.” And I entered the school intending at first to become a teacher in it, but then I got tired of pedagogy.

At school I met girls from the city, and became friends with some of them. But I kept in touch with the things and the people in our village, from which I received frequent news, and now and again a visit. And the fame of our parish priest reached even as far as the school, and he began to be talked about in the cathedral city. The nuns questioned me unceasingly about him.

From the time I was very young on, I don’t know exactly how, I fed on curiosities, worries, and anxieties, caused at least in part because of that jumble of books belonging to my father, and all of it increased in school, in my dealings especially with a friend who became extremely fond of me, and who sometimes proposed that we should enter the same convent together, swearing eternal sisterhood and even signing the vow in our blood. Other times she spoke to me with her eyes half closed of boyfriends, of matrimonial adventures. Actually, I have not heard from her again nor do I know her fate.And when we talked of Don Manuel, or when my mother told me something about him in her letters, (and he was in nearly all of them) that I used to read to my friend, she used to exclaim as if in ecstasy, “How lucky you are my friend, being able to live near a saint like that, a real live saint, of flesh and bone, and be able to kiss his hand! When you return to your town, write lots to me, lots and lots, tell me all about him!”

I spent some five years in the school, that now seems lost as if in a morning dream in the far off mist of memory, and at fifteen I returned to my Valverde de Lucerna. Now it was all Don Manuel, Don Manuel with the lake and the mountain. I arrived anxious to meet him, to put myself under his protection, so that he might set out for me my life’s direction.

It was said that he had entered Seminary to become a priest with the goal of taking care of the children of one of his sisters, recently widowed, to serve as their father; that in seminary he had distinguished himself by his mental acuity, and his talent, and that he had rejected offers of a brilliant ecclesiastical career because he only wanted to stay in Valverde de Lucerna, a village stuck like a broach between the lake and the mountain that was reflected in it.

And how he loved his people! His life was fixing broken marriages, reconciling wild sons to their fathers, or reconciling fathers to their sons, and especially consoling the bitter and bored, and to help all die a good Christian death.

I remember among other things, that when the disgraced daughter of tía Rabona returned from the city, (the daughter who had ruined herself and returned single, hopeless, bringing a little son with her), Don Manuel never stopped until he had her old boyfriend Perote marry her, and recognize as his own the little child, telling him:

“Look, give this poor little one a father, for he only has the one in heaven...”

“But Don Manuel, I’m not the guilty one!”

“Who knows, my son, who knows....! and especially because its not a question of guilt.”

And now poor Perote, an invalid and paralyzed, has as his staff and comfort in life that son, the one who, having caught the holiness of Don Manuel, he recognized as his son, even though he was not.

On St. John’s night, the shortest night of the year, there is accustomed to come to our lake all the poor old ladies and not a few little old men who are considered possessed of the devil, and who seem really only to be hysterics, and sometimes epileptics, and Don Manuel undertook the task of trying to alleviate them and if possible cure them. And his presence was such that his looks, and especially the extremely sweet authority of his words, and above all his voice- how miraculous was his voice- that he succeeded in getting surprising cures. So his fame increased, which attracted to our lake and to him all the sick people in the district. And once a mother arrived asking him to do a miracle for her son, and he answered her smiling sadly;

“I do not have permission from our lord bishop to perform miracles.”

He was especially careful that every one should be clean. If someone wore a torn outfit, he would say to them, “Go see the sacristan, so he can mend that.” The sacristan was a tailor. And when they would go to congratulate him on New Years day, since it was his saint’s day, (his patron saint was Jesus Our Lord), Don Manuel wanted everyone to come dressed in a new shirt, and if someone did not have one, he himself gave them a present of one.

He showed the same affection for everyone, and if he paid more attention to some, it was to the most unfortunate, and to those that seemed most rebellious. And as there was in the town a poor boy retarded since birth, Blasillo the fool, he was most affectionate to him and even succeeded in teaching him things that seemed a miracle that he had been able to learn them. And the little ember of intelligence that still remained in the retarded boy was lit when he imitated like a poor monkey Don Manuel.

His marvelous feature was his voice, a divine voice that made one weep. When on officiating at a high or solemn mass, he intoned the preface, the church trembled and all who heard him were moved to their very core. His chant, going out from the church went to sleep on the lake and at the foot of the mountain. And when in the sermon on Good Friday, he cried out that “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” a deep tremble went through the town as over the waters of the lake on the days of the north wind. And it was as if they heard Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, as if the voice broke from that old crucifix at whose feet so many generations of mothers had left their anxieties. So that once, when his mother heard him, Don Manuel’s, she could not hold back and from the part of the church in which she was seated, she cried “My Son!” And there was a shower of tears from everyone. It was as if they believed that the maternal cry had broken forth out of the half open mouth of that statue of the Sorrowing Virgin - her heart traversed by seven swords- that was in one of the chapels of the church. Then Blasillo, the fool, went around repeating in a pathetic tone, through the byways and like an echo, the “My God , my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and in such a way that on hearing him everyone broke out in tears of pleasure at the imitative triumph of the poor foolish boy.

His dealing with the people was such that no one dared to lie in front of him, and everyone, without having to go to the confessional, confessed to him. It reached such a point that when once a repugnant crime was committed in a nearby town, the judge, an insensitive man who did not know Don Manuel well, called him and said to him:

“Lets see if you, Don Manuel, can make this bandit tell the truth.”

“So that you can punish him?” replied the holy man. “No, sir judge, no, I don’t get the truth from anyone that might perhaps lead to his death. There between God and him...Human justice does not concern me. Judge not lest you be judged., Our Lord said.”

“But its just that I, sir priest...”

“Understood; render, sir judge, unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and I will give unto God that which is God’s.”

And upon leaving he looked piercingly at the presumed criminal and said to him;

“Be careful that God has pardoned you, for that is the only thing that matters.”

In the town everyone went to mass, even if they only went to hear and see him at the altar where he seemed to be transfigured, his face lighting up. There was a holy practice that he introduced into the popular rite, and that was, gathering in the church the whole town, men and women, old and young, some thousand people, we used to recite in unison, with one single voice, the Creed: I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, and what follows. And it was not a chorus but a single voice, a voice simple and united, all founded on one and acting like a mountain whose crest, lost sometimes in the clouds, was Don Manuel. And upon arriving at the part -I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting-, the voice of Don Manuel plunged as into a lake, into that of the whole town, and it was there that he grew quiet. And I heard the bells of the village that they say is submerged in the lake bed here, bells that they say are also heard on the eve of St. John’s day and they were those of the submerged village in the spiritual lake of our town. I heard the voice of our dead who were resurrected in us in the communion of saints. Afterwards, upon learning the secret of our saint, I understood that it was as if a caravan going through the dessert after the leader had died, upon approaching the end of their course, took him on their shoulders in order to put his lifeless body in the promised land.

Most did not want to die unless holding onto his hand as if to an anchor.

Never in his sermons did he set himself to preach against the unrighteous,- masons, liberals or heretics. Why, if there were none in the village? Nor even against the wicked press. Instead, one of his most frequent themes in his sermons was against gossip or slander. Because he forgave everyone and everything. He did not want to believe in the bad intentions of anyone.

“Envy,” he liked to repeat, “is maintained by those who believe themselves envied, and most persecutions are in fact the result of a persecuting mania rather than a persecutor.”

“But look, Don Manuel, what I meant to say...”

And he “We ought not to worry so much about what one means to say as to what one may say without meaning to....”

His life was active and not contemplative, fleeing as much as he could from not having anything to do. When he heard that Idleness is the mother of all vices, he answered “and the worst of all is to think idly.” And as I asked him once what he meant by that, he answered me “To think idly is to think in order not to do anything or to think too much about what one has done instead of what one has yet to do. What’s done is done. And another thing, there is nothing worse than remorse over what cannot be remedied. To act, to act.” I understood well from then on, that Don Manuel fled from idle thinking and when alone, from some thought that persecuted him.

So it was that he was always busy, and not a few times in inventing occupations. He wrote very little for himself so that he did not leave us writings or notes, rather, on the other hand, he made himself a memoir writer for others, and for mothers especially he wrote letters to their absent children.

He worked manually also, helping with his arms in certain labors of the town. At threshing time he went to thresh and winnow and while he taught them he entertained them. He sometimes substituted at their job for someone sick. One day, the cruelest in winter, he met a child, half dead with cold, whose father had sent him to pick up a cow a long way off on the mountain.

“Look”, he told the child, “go back home and warm yourself and tell your father that I am going to take charge of it.”

And upon returning with the animal he met the father, all confused who went out to meet him. In winter he chopped wood for the poor. When that magnificent walnut tree dried up, a matriarchal walnut tree he called it, in whose shade he had played as a child, he took it to his house and afterwards he made it into six boards that he kept at the foot of his bed.. He made wood to warm the poor from the rest. He also used to make balls for the boys to play with and not a few toys for the children.

He used to accompany the doctor on his rounds, and reinforced the prescriptions of the latter. He was especially interested in pregnancies, in the raising of children and he thought it one of the greatest blasphemies that of “From the cradle straight to heaven” and the other one “little angels in heaven.” He was profoundly moved by the death of children.

“A child who is born dead or that dies just after being born, and a suicide,” he said once, “are for me the most terrible of mysteries, a crucified child!”

And once, because of having taken his own life, the father of a suicide, a stranger,
asked if he would bury him in sacred ground, he answered him;

“Certainly, for in the last moment, in the second of death, he doubtless repented.”

He often went to school to help the teacher, to teach with him and not only the catechism. He fled from idleness and solitude. So that because of being with the people, and above all the young people and the children, he used to go to dances. And more than once he set himself to play the drum so that the boys and girls could dance, and this, which in another would have seemed a grotesque profanation of priesthood, in him took on the sacred character as of a religious practice. When the Angelus sounded, he dropped the drum and stick, took off his hat and everyone with him prayed; “The Angel of the Lord announced to Mary, Hail Mary....”And then

“And now, let’s rest for tomorrow.”

“The main thing,” he said, “is for the people to be happy, that everyone be happy with their life. The happiness of life is the main thing of all. No one should want to die until God wills it.”

“But I do” once a recent widow told him, “I want to follow my husband.”

“And for what purpose?” he replied. “Stay here in order to commend his soul to God.”

At a wedding once he said, “And if I could only change all the water of our lake into wine, into a wine that no matter how much you drank, you would grow happy without ever getting drunk, or at least achieving a happy drunkenness.”

Once there passed through the town a band of poor puppeteers. The leader of it, who arrived with a gravely ill and pregnant wife, and with three children who helped him, played the clown. While he was making the children and even the adults laugh in the town square, she, feeling suddenly gravely indisposed, had to retire and she withdrew escorted by a look of worry from the clown, and a burst of laughter from the children. And escorted by Don Manuel who then, in a corner of the inn in the square, helped her to die a Christian death. And when the party was over, and the townspeople and the clown learned the whole tragedy, they all went to the inn and the poor man, saying with tears in his voice; “They tell the truth dear priest that you are a saint,” and approaching him tried to take his hand to kiss it, but don Manuel anticipated him and taking the clown’s hand pronounced before everyone;

“You are the saint, honorable clown; I saw you work and I understood that not only do you do it to give your children bread, but also to make others happy. and I tell you that your wife, the mother of your children whom I have dispatched to God while you worked and made people happy, rests in the Lord and you will join her and the angels will pay you laughing, and those whom you make laugh in the heaven of contentment.”

And every one, children and adults, wept, and wept as much from grief as from a mysterious happiness in which grief was drowned. And later, remembering that solemn time, I understood that the imperturbable happiness of don Manuel was the temporal and earthly form of an infinite sadness that with heroic holiness he hid from the eyes and ears of others.

With that constant activity of his, and with that joining in the work and play of everyone, he seemed to want to flee from himself, to want to flee from his solitude. “I fear solitude” he repeated. But even so, from time to time he went alone to the banks of the lake to the ruins of that old abbey, where still seem to repose the souls of the pious Cistercians whom history had buried in oblivion. The cell of the one called Father Captain is there, and on its walls it is said there are still marks from the drops of blood with which he sprinkled them when whipping himself. Whatever did our Don Manuel think about there? What I do remember is that once, when talking about the abbey, I asked him why it had not occurred to him to go into a cloister, he answered me;

“It is not especially because I have, as I do have, my widowed sister and my nieces and nephews to look after, for God helps his poor, but because I was not born to be a hermit, to be an anchorite. The solitude would kill my soul, and as for a monastery, my monastery is Valverde de Lucerna. I ought not to live alone, I must not die alone. I must live for my people, die for my people. How am I going to save my soul if I do not save that of my people?”

“But there have been holy hermits, solitary people,” I told him.

“Yes, the Lord gave them the grace of solitude that has been denied to me, and I have to be resigned to it. I cannot lose my people in order to win my soul. So God has made me. I would not be able to stand the temptations of the dessert. I would not be able to bear alone the cross of birth.”

I have wanted with these memoirs, those on which my faith lives, to portray our Don Manuel such as he was when I, a girl of about 17 years old, returned from the religious school of Renada to our monastery of Valverde de Lucerna. I returned to put myself at the feet of this abbot.

“Hi, daughter of La Simona,”- he said to me when he saw me, “and now turned into a young lady, and knowing French, and how to embroider and play the piano and I don’t know what all. Now ready to give us another family. And your brother, Lazaro, when is he returning? He stays on in the New World does he?”

“Yes, sir, he stays in America.”

“The New World, and we in the Old. But fine, when you write him tell him for me, for the priest, that I am wanting him to return from the New World to this Old one, to bring news from over there. And tell him he will find the lake and the mountain like he left them.”

When I went to confess with him, my unease was so great that I couldn’t say a word. I prayed the “I a sinner”, stammering, almost sobbing. And he, who noticed it, said to me;

“But what is wrong little lamb? What or whom are you afraid of? Because you do not tremble now under the weight of your sins nor out of fear of God. No you tremble because of me, is that not so?”

I began to cry.

“But what have they told you about me? What stories are these? Maybe your mother? Come on now, come on, calm down, and know that you are talking with your brother.”

I took heart, and began to confide in him my anxieties, my doubts, my sadness.

“Bah bah bah. And where have you read that little miss-know-it-all. All that is just literature. Don’t spend too much time on it, not even on Saint Teresa. And if you want to entertain yourself, read the Bertoldo that your father read.”

I left that, my first confession with the holy man, profoundly consoled. And that my first fear, that more than respect, fright, with which I approached him, changed into a profound pity. I was then a young woman, almost a girl, but I began to be a woman. I felt in my very core the juice of maternity and on finding myself in the confessional next to the holy man I felt like I heard his quiet confession in the submissive murmur of his voice, and I remembered how when he cried out in the church the words of Jesus Christ. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” his mother, Don Manuel’s, replied from her place; “My son!” and I heard that cry that broke the stillness of the church. And I confessed again with him in order to console him.

Once, when in the confessional, I explained one of my doubts to him, he answered me, “As for that, you know your catechism. Do not ask me for I am ignorant...the Holy Mother church has learned men who would know how to reply.”

“But if the learned man here is you, Don Manuel?”

“Me? Me a learned man? Don’t even think it. I, my learned little one, am nothing but a poor village priest. And those questions. Do you know who sends them to you, who directs them to you? Well, it is the devil.”

And then, growing brave, I spit it out to him:

“And if he directs them to you Don Manuel?”

“To whom? To me? The Devil? We do not know each other, daughter, we do not know each other.”

“And if he did direct them to you?”

“I wouldn’t pay attention to him. And that’s enough eh? Lets hurry for some truly sick people are waiting for me.”

I withdrew, thinking, I don’t know why, that our Don Manuel, such a famous curer of devil-possessed people, did not believe in the Devil. And on going home I ran across Blasillo the fool, who by chance was going by the church, and on seeing me, in order to entertain me with his abilities, he repeated, and how he did it...that “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” I reached the house very grief stricken and shut myself up in my room to cry until my mother came.

“It seems to me, Angelita, that with so many confessions, you are going to become a nun on me.”

“Don't fear that, mother,” I answered her, “for I have plenty to do here in the town which is my convent.”

“Until you marry.”

“I don’t intend to.” I answered her.

And another time that I met Don Manuel, I asked him looking straight into his eyes:
“And is there a Hell, Don Manuel?”

And he, without flinching;

“For you, my daughter, no.”

“And for others, is there?”

“And what does it matter to you if you are not going to it?”

“It matters to me for the others. Is there?”

“Believe in heaven, in the heaven that we see. Look at it, and he showed it to me on top of the mountain and below, reflected in the lake.”

“But you must believe in Hell as in Heaven,” I answered him.

“You have to believe everything that the Holy Mother Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church believes and teaches to believe. And that’s enough.”

I read I don’t know what deep sadness in his eyes, blue as the waters of the lake.

The years passed as in a dream. The image of Don Manuel kept on growing in me without my realizing it, for he was such a daily man, as daily as the daily bread we asked for in the Our Father. I used to help him as much as I could in his duties; I visited the sick, our sick, the girls at school, I fixed the robes in the church, I became, as he called me, his deaconess. I went for a few days as a guest to a school friend in the city, and had to return, because I was drowning in the city, I needed something, I felt thirsty for the sight of the waters of the lake, hungry for the sight of the peaks of the mountain, I felt above all the lack of my Don Manuel, and as if his absence called me, as if he was in danger far from me, as if he needed me; I wanted to alleviate for him the weight of his cross of birth.

So I was approaching my 24th year when my brother Lazaro returned from the New World, bringing a small fortune he had saved. He arrived here, in Valverde de Lucerna with the idea of taking my mother and me to live in the city, perhaps Madrid.

“In the village,” he said, “one grows silly, one grows crude and one grows poor.” And he added;

“Civilization is the contrary of ruralization, village foolishness no! I didn’t have you go to school so you could rot here afterwards, among these crude country bumpkins.”

I kept quiet, although ready to resist emigration, but our mother who was more than sixty, opposed it from the first. “At my age to change waters?” she said first. But then she gave him to understand quite clearly that she could not live away from the sight of her lake, of her mountain, and above all, of her Don Manuel.

“You are like cats that stick to their hearth!” my brother repeated.

When he realized the complete control our holy man exercised over the whole town, and especially over us, my mother and me, he grew irritated at him. He seemed to represent to him the dark theocracy in which he believed Spain was sunk. And he began to spout off without ceasing all the old anti-clerical and even anti-religious commonplaces that he had brought renewed from the New World.

In this Spain of weaklings, he used to say, the priests handle the women and the women handle the men, and then the countryside. The countryside. This feudal country...

For him feudal was a terrible word; feudal and medieval were the two names he preached when he wanted to condemn something.

The lack of effect that his diatribes had on us disconcerted him, as well as the lack of effect they had on the town where they listened to him with polite indifference. “There is no one who can reach these rustics.” But because he was good, as well as intelligent, he soon realized the sort of power that don Manuel commanded over the town and he soon found out about the work of the priest in the town.

“No he’s not like the others,” he said, “he is a saint!”

“But do you know what other priests are like?” I asked him.

“I can imagine.”

But he still never entered the church, nor did he stop making evident everywhere his lack of belief, although always excepting Don Manuel. And then there began to form in the town, I don’t know how, a sort of expectation, like a duel between my brother and Don Manuel, or rather the conversion of the former by the latter. No one doubted that in the end, the parish priest would bring him into his parish. Lazaro on the other hand, was burning with desire (he told me later) to hear Don Manuel, to see him and to hear him in the church, to approach him and talk with him, to know the secret of his spiritual dominion over souls. And he was asked about it so much that finally, out of curiosity- he said- he went to hear him.

“Yes, this is something else,” he told me as soon as he heard him. “He is not like the others, but he doesn’t fool me; he is too intelligent to believe everything he has to teach.”

“But do you think he is a hypocrite?” I asked him.

“Hypocrite? No! But he has to live out the office he has.”

As for me, my brother was anxious for me to read the books that he brought and others he encouraged me to buy.

“So your brother Lazaro,” said Don Manuel, “is anxious for you to read. Well, read, my daughter, read and enjoy. I know you will not read anything but good things, read even novels. Histories that are called true are not any better. Its better for you to read than to feed on the gossip and old wives’ tales in the town. But read especially pious works that make you happy to live, a pleasant and silent happiness.”

Did he have it?

Then our mother grew fatally ill and died, and in her last days, her only desire was that Don Manuel should convert Lazaro whom she expected to see again one day in heaven, in a corner of the stars whence she might see the lake and mountain of Valverde de Lucerna. She was leaving now to see God.

“You are not leaving,” Don Manuel said to her, “you are staying. Your body here at this hearth and your soul also here, in this house, seeing and hearing your children, even if they cannot see nor hear you.”

“But I, father, I am going to see God.”

“God, my child, is here as everywhere, and you will see him from here. And all of us in Him and He in us.”

“May it so please God, ” I said to him.

“The contentment in which your mother dies,” he told me, “will be her eternal life.”
And turning to my brother Lazaro;

“Her heaven is to continue seeing you, and now is when you must save her. Tell her that you will pray for her.”

“But,”

“But? Tell her that you will pray for her, the one to whom you owe your life, and I know that once you promise you will pray, and I know that as soon as you pray...”

My brother, his eyes full of tears, approaching our dying mother, promised her solemnly to pray for her.

“And I in heaven for you, for you both,” replied my mother, and kissing the crucifix and with her eyes turned to those of Don Manuel she handed her soul over to God.

“Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” prayed the holy man.

My brother and I were left alone in the house. What happened at the death of our mother put Lazaro in contact with Don Manuel who seemed to somewhat neglect his other patients, his other needy people, in order to attend to my brother. They went for walks in the afternoons along the banks of the lake or towards the ivy-clothed ruins of the old Cistercian abbey.

“He is a marvelous man,” Lazaro told me. “You know how they say that in the bottom of the lake there is a submerged village, and that on St. John’s Eve at midnight, you can hear the bells of its church?”

“Yes,” I answered him, “a feudal and medieval village.”

“And I think,” he added, “that in the depths of the soul of our Don Manuel there is also submerged, drowned, a village, and that some times you hear its bells.”

“Yes,” I told him, “that submerged village in Don Manuel’s soul...and why not in yours too? It is the cemetery of the souls of our grandparents, those from our Valverde de Lucerna, feudal and medieval!”

My brother ended up always going to mass to hear Don Manuel, and when he said he would commune with the parish, that he would commune when the others communed, there ran an intimate rejoicing through the whole town that believed they had brought him back. But it was such a clean rejoicing that Lazaro did not feel either conquered or diminished.

And the day of his communion arrived, before the whole town and with the whole town. When my brother’s turn came, I could see that Don Manuel, as white as the snow on the mountain in January, and trembling like the lake when the wind blew over it, approached with the sacred host in his hand, and he was trembling so much that when he brought it to Lazaro’s mouth, he dropped the host as he was overtaken with dizziness. And it was my brother himself who picked up the host and brought it to his mouth. And the people, on seeing Don Manuel weep, wept too saying, “How he loves him.” And then, because it was dawn, a cock crowed.

On returning home and shutting myself in with my brother, I threw my arms around his neck and kissing him said:

“Ay Lazaro, Lazaro, how happy you have made us all, all of us, the whole town, everyone, the living and the dead, and especially Mama, our mother. Did you see? Poor Don Manuel wept with joy. What joy you have given us all!”

“That’s why I did it.” he answered me.

“That’s why? To make us happy? You must have done it for yourself, through conversion.”

And then Lazaro, my brother, as pale and trembling as Don Manuel when he gave him communion, made me sit down in the very chair where our mother used to sit, took a deep breath, and then, in an intimate, domestic and family confession told me:
“Look Angelita, the time has come to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and I’m going to tell you, because I must tell you, because I cannot and must not keep it quiet and because besides, you would have guessed half of it, which is worse, sooner or later.”

And then serenely and quietly, in a half whisper, he told me a story that submerged me into a lake of sadness. How Don Manuel had worked on him especially during those walks to the ruins of the old Cistercian abbey, for him not to cause problems, for him to give a good example, for him to conform himself to the religious life of the people, for him to pretend to believe if he didn’t believe, for him to hide his ideas in that respect, but without even trying to teach him the catechism, to convert him in a different way.

“But is that possible?” I exclaimed, confounded.

“And so possible my sister, and so possible.” And when I said to him “But how can you a priest advise me to pretend?” he, stammering “To pretend? To pretend, no. That is not pretending. Take holy water someone said and you will end up believing. And as I, looking into his eyes said to him, ‘And you celebrating mass, have you ended up believing?’ he lowered his gaze to the lake and his eyes filled with tears. And that is how I got his secret from him.”

“Lazaro!” I groaned.

And at that moment, Blasillo the fool went by in the street calling his “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And Lázaro shuddered, thinking he heard the voice of San Manuel, or perhaps that of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Then,” continued my brother, “I understood his motives and that is when I understood his sainthood; because he is a saint, my sister, a complete saint. He didn’t try to win me for his holy cause, because it is a cause, because it is a holy cause, extremely holy, but he did it for peace, for happiness and for the illusions if you want, of those who are entrusted to him; I understood that if he deceived them thus, if this is deceit, it is not to win anything for himself. I gave in to his speeches, and here is my conversion. And I will never forget the day on which I said to him, ‘But Don Manuel, the truth, the truth above all!’ he, trembling, whispered in my ear even though we were in the middle of the countryside. “The truth? The truth Lazaro is perhaps something terrible, something intolerable, something mortal; the simple people could not live with it.” “And why did you let me get a glimpse of it here and now, as if in a confession?” And he “Because if not, it torments me so that I would end up shouting it in the middle of the square, and never that, never, never, never. I have to make the souls of my parishioners live, to make them happy and to make them dream themselves immortal, and not to kill them. What is needed here is that they live in a healthy way in unanimity of feeling, and with the truth, with my truth, they wouldn’t live. Let them live. And this is what the church does. It lets them live. True religion? All religions are true insofar as they make their people that profess them live spiritually, insofar as they console them for having been born to die, and for each people the truest religion is theirs, the one that has made them. And mine? Mine is to console myself by consoling others, although the consolation I give them is not mine.” I will never forget these words of his.

“But that communion of yours was a sacrilege!” I dared to suggest, repenting immediately upon suggesting it.

“Sacrilege? and the one who gave it to me? And his masses?”

“What martyrdom!” I exclaimed.

“And now,” added my brother, “there is another one to console the people.”

“To deceive them?” I said.

“To deceive them, no,” he answered, “but to corroborate them in their faith.”

“And it, the town,” I said, “does it truly believe?”

“How do I know? It believes unwittingly, out of habit, out of tradition. And what is necessary is not to wake them up. And let them live in their poverty of sense so that they not acquire the torture of luxury. Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

“That, my brother, you have learned from Don Manuel. And now, tell me, have you fulfilled that promise that you made to our mother when she was going to die on us, that one that you would pray for her?”

“Who would not fulfill it! Who have you taken me for? my sister. Do you think me capable of failing to keep my word, a solemn promise, and a promise made at the bedside of a dying mother?”

“What do I know! You could have deceived her so that she could die content.”

“The fact is, if I didn’t fulfill the promise, I would live without consolation.”

“Then?”

“I fulfilled the promise and I have not failed to pray for her one single day.”

“Only for her?”

“Well, who else?”

“For yourself! And from now on for Don Manuel!”

We separated, each to his own room, I to weep all night long and to ask for the conversion of my brother and of Don Manuel. And he, Lázaro I don’t know very well, for what.

After that day, I trembled to find myself alone with Don Manuel, whom I continued accompanying on his pious duties. And he seemed to realize my inner state, and to guess its cause. And when I finally approached him in the confessional, who was the judge and who the criminal? The two of us, he and I bowed our head in silence and began to weep. And it was he, don Manuel who broke the tremendous silence to tell me with a voice that seemed to come out of his bones,

“But you, Angelina, you believe as when you were ten, isn’t it so? You believe.”

“Yes, I believe, Father.”

“Then keep on believing . And if doubts occur to you, keep them quiet even from yourself. One must live.”

I dared, all trembling, to say;

“But you, father, do you believe?”

He hesitated a moment, and answering me said;

“I believe.”

“But in what, father, in what? Do you believe in the after life? Do you believe that when we die we do not die to everything. Do you believe that we will see each other again, to love each other in the life to come? Do you believe in the after life?”

The poor saint was sobbing.

“Look, daughter, lets leave this alone.”

And now, on writing this memoir, I wonder. Why did he not deceive me? Why did he not deceive me then as he deceived the others? Why was he so afflicted? Because he couldn’t deceive himself or because he couldn’t deceive me? And I want to believe that he was afflicted because he could not deceive himself in order to deceive me.

“And now,” he added, “pray for me, for your brother, for yourself, for everyone. One must live, And one must give life.”

And after a pause

“And why do you not marry Angela?”

“You already know, my father, why.”

“But no, no. You have to marry. Between Lazaro and me, we will find you a boyfriend. Because you need to get married to cure yourself of these worries.”

“Worries Don Manuel?”

“I know what I’m saying. And don’t worry too much about the rest, that each one has enough to have to answer for himself.”

“And you are the one, Don Manuel, to tell me that? That you are the one who advises me to marry to answer for myself and not worry about the others? You are the one?”

“You are right, Angelina, I no longer know what I am saying now that I am confessing to you. But yes, yes, it is necessary to live, one must live.”

And when I began to get up to leave the church he said to me;

“And now, Angelina, in the name of the people, do you absolve me?”

I felt myself penetrated with a mysterious priesthood, and I said to him;

“In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I absolve you father.”

And we left the church, and on leaving I felt my maternal core tremble.

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