PARTISAN REVIEW
claims only .his negation; but he always &truggles and negates "in
the
name" of something, a positive ideal has already matured in him,
and it alone gives him the passion and strength to struggle. This
ideal is indistinct and unexpressed: only such an
~deal
moves the
will; a clearly realized and expressible ideal is not a system of barely
alive, weakly motivating, distinct ideas- a product of disintegration.
What do I want? I want freedom of consciousness and quest, I want
the primordial freshness of spirit in order to go whither I please,
along unbeaten paths, untrampled tracks, first because it would be
pleasant, and second because- who knows?- on new paths we might
find more. But no: chiefly because it is boring here, as in our sana–
torium. I long for meadows and woods.
I not only want this- ! firmly believe that it will be so; otherwise,
whence comes this feeling in me? The genuineness and strength of
my feeling are in my eyes a guarantee that it will be so. You know:
from the reptiles came the birds; and my feeling is like the burning
sensation and the itch on the shoulders of the amphibian when his
wings began to sprout. The confused dream of that Greek and that
Australian were divinations and heralds of the freedom that material–
ized centuries later. Perhaps after his original freedom man needed
to go through a long period of discipline, dogma, and law, in order
once again to come out into freedom as a changed being: this may
be so. But woe to the generations to whose lot fell the intermediate
stage--the way of culture. Culture is disintegrating from within–
this we see clearly, and it hangs down in rags from the exhausted
spirit. Whether liberation will come about in this form, or whether it
will
break out in a catastrophe, as it did twenty centuries ago, I do
not know, and of course I myself shall not enter the promised land.
VII.
ToM. 0. Gershenzon:
"There is no motion, said the bearded sage...." His inter–
locutor replied by giving him the symbolic advice to prove the just–
ness of his opinion . by experience- ".and before his eyes began to
walk." Needless to say, the first was not a cripple either; he, too,
could move his legs, but did not attach any value to the motions
of his body because of unbelief in his own experience. A large part
of your objections I ascribe to autosuggestion- to the impact of a
964
