PARTISAN REVIEW
No, no! I speak all the time of temptations of the spirit, of poison in
the blood, in life itself; I speak precisely of the most precious achieve–
ments brought about in the course of thousands of years of experience,
of what you call the genuine initiations of the fbrefathers, of objective
and indisputable truth-and I say that this very life source of spiritual
existence is poisoned and no longer gives life to the soul but deadens it.
What is in question is precisely the dynamism of discovered truth,
its power to bring forth initiations of the spirit. You write: "For mem–
ory, its supreme ruler, .makes its servants partake in the initiations of
the forefathers, and renewing these initiations in them, gives them the
strength for new beginnings, new exploits." 0 if only this were so! But
it was so once-and ceased to be. It came to pass that the revelations
of truth bringing light to the ancestors have changed into mummies, into
fetishes, and no longer plunge into the soul like a blissfully destructive
charge but bury it under the granite blocks and rubble of disintegrated
ideas. Objective truth both is and is not; it exists in reality only as a
way, a direction, but not as a ready-made datum, th·at can and must
be appropriated, following the words of Goethe, which you .quote.
If
it were true that "truth has long ago been acquired," then .of course
life would not be worth living. In the initiations of the forefathers, not
their content is precious, because the content of any truth discovered
by man is relative, and to the same extent false and transient; what
is precious is only their methodology, if this term is proper here. You
should know better than anyone that every expression of the truth is
symbolic-that it is only a sign, a sound that dispels inertia and moves
us to turn our eyes in the direction whence it comes. Speaking of truth
as a constant initiator, you depict human existence not as it is but pre–
cisely as I would like to see it. I say this: that the initiations of the fore–
fathers have become petrified, have turned into despotic values which by
tempting and intimidating us, reduce the individual spirit to a resigned
and even voluntary submission to them, or, by enveloping the spirit in
a fog, veil our sight. But I wrote about this once before:
Everyone knew that Napoleon was not born an Emperor. A simple
woman seeing him from the crowd during some splendid parade, might
have thought: 'now he is the Emperor who almost lost his personal name,
he is the ruler of nations-yet in his swaddling clothes he was nothing
to the world, only another child of his mother's.'--Similarly, when I
stand in a museum before a famous painting, I think to myself the
artist painted it for himself, and in the act of creation it was inseparable
from him-he was in it and it in him; yet now it has been elevated to
the world throne, as an objective value."
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