A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
preconceived idea of a speculative order; the other part, to your
unquenched hunger for life. In your words there is so much despair,
and between the lines, in the inner ring and rhythm of the words, as
well as in your characteristic vitality, there is so much youthful vigor,
so much longing to experience the still unexplored, to wander on
trackless paths, to embrace living nature, so much longing for play
and valor and the virgin gifts of the generous
earth-tant de desir,
enfin, de faire un peu l'ecole buissonniere- that
it would seem, my
dear Doctor Faustus reincarnate, still trailing some of your old anxiety,
that Mephistopheles, looking at you, would not at once have to lose
all hope for success
if
it occurred to him to discover the appropriate
temptations with which to lure one wearied by the burden of his
faculties out of his jealously defended "corner" into the open, into a
broad and free life. Naturally, he would have to invent subtler tactics,
and refrain from showing you an enchanting feminine image-it
would be more effective, after another reminder that theory is gray
while the golden tree of life is eternally green, to begin with little
flowers in a pure glade and virgin groves of trees.
Naturally, too, the "open" would once again prove to be, at the
end of a new series of adventures, a prison without exit. Perhaps the
last of Faust's temptations would prove to be the first of yours-the
canals, and the new world, and the illusion of a free land for the
liberated people. After all, there is no limit to the number of two–
dimensional drawings and designs that can be traced on a horizontal
surface. The essential thing is that it is horizontal. But I am no
Mephistopheles, and that is why I do not want to lure you anywhere.
The whole meaning of my discourses is the affirmation of a vertical
line that can be traced from any point, from any "corner" lying on
the surface of any culture at
all,
young or senile. But for me, culture
itself, in its true meaning, is not at all a surface, nor a plain of ruins
or a field strewn with bones. There is also something truly sacred in
it: it is memory of not only the earthly and external face of the
ancestors but also of the initiations that they attained. A living,
eternal memory, which does not die in those who partake of these
initiations! For these were given by the fathers for their most distant
descendants, and not one iota of the once newly written characters,
engraved on the tablets of the indivisible human spirit, will pass
(continued on p.
1028)
965
