A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO COR;NERS
How often have we lovingly spoken of him! Has he not seen through
the emptiness of speculation, the deadening dogmatism of ideas and
systems? Does he not thirst for freedom? His yearning spirit is help–
lessly struggling to wrest itself free; now he strives to unravel the
knots of dogmatic thinking that have fettered mankind, now he en–
thusiastically tells of the short-lived breakthroughs achieved by one or
another, Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, Ibsen or Tolstoy, and about their
lamentable return to the cage. With poison in one's blood, with ex–
haustion in one's bones, one cannot regain liberty. Faith, and love,
and.inspiration, everything that can liberate the spirit- everything in
us is infected and sickly. Do you fondly imagine that on the soil piled
with the blocks of century-old theories and systems, with the count–
less fragments of ancient, old, and new ideas, encumbered in disorder
with the mausoleums of "spiritual values"- the indisputable values
of faith, thought, art- that on such a soil there could grow mighty
oaks and tender violets? Perhaps a withered and thorny shrub might
grow on it, and the ivy of ruins.
But this is not what I wanted to speak about. You are right!
I do not know at all and do not wish to know what man will en–
counter "beyond the· bars of his abandoned prison," and I frankly
confess my total indifference toward "the cause of carving out the
path to freedom"; all this, my friend, is speculation, speculation
once again. I am surfeited even with those theories that fill the air
around me and my own reason. I am not interested in ratiocinations.
I "simply," as you say, feel the urgent need of freedom for my spirit
or consciousness, just as, probably, some Greek of the sixth century
felt himself tormentingly fettered by the excessive plurality of the
divinities of the Olympus, by their pretended qualities and claims,
by the luxurious abundance of sanctified myths and religious rites-–
just as, perhaps, an Australian native suffocates in the stifling at–
mosphere of his confusing animism or totemism, lacking the inward
strength to liberate himself from them. Beyond the bars of the prison
this Greek perhaps dreamed of standing freely before one universal
impersonal God whom his soul divined, and that Australian of the
unconcern of the spirit not oppressed by fear, and of the free choice
of a wife, unhampered by totemistic prohibitions, Neither one nor
the other would have been able to voice his positive drean1 and hope.
He who wants to liberate himself sees only the bruTier and pro-
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