A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
as invisible and omnipresent; but you are trying to assure me that this
statue is a symbol of my deity, and that once I have fully grasped its
significance, it will entirely replace God for me. And although you reveal
its symbolic nature to me in a very interesting, very profound way-I am
ready to listen to you endlessly, I am almost convinced by you-its ap–
pearance is so terrifying and so repulsive to my feeling that I cannot
control myself. I remember all the sacrifices that we offered to it, I
think of the heavy, bloody sacrifices I will have to offer to it from day
to day according to the instructions of its priests. No, no! This is not
God!
My
God, the invisible one, makes no demands, nor does he frighten
or crucify. He is my life, my movement, freedom, my genuine will. That
is what I meant when I told you that my thirst turns away from the
warm and spicy drinks of contemporary philosophy, art, and poetry,
that only cold spring water can quench it. And in our existence there
is no longer any water of life; all the springs have been enclosed in
reservoirs, their water captured into mile-long pipes, then filtered and
sterilized; finally this half-dead liquid is subject to city processing; we
drink either boiled water, or complicated beverages of all sorts of tastes,
colors, and odors. In the midst of these luxurious containers of thick and
warm philosophy, of hot and aromatic poetry, one can die of thirst with–
out finding a swallow of cool water.
Forgive me this protracted metaphor: it is so hot these days, and
nowhere can I find refreshment; I drink and drink warm boiled water,
I have drunk all the water in our decanter, and still I have not quenched
my thirst. That, no doubt, is why I have been writing about thirst. I
recall how on just such a hot day, many years ago, I drank spring
water from a pitcher at a shady spot in a woods near Kuntsev. The
air was cool, and it was delightful to drink the pure spring water. Even
if
by the will of fate, by the order of culture, I am living in the city,
resting in a sanatorium, in a stuffy room with a window giving on a
wall, drinking repulsive overboiled water, and chasing swarms of flies,
can I help recalling that there are woods and cool places, can I help
longing for them? And there is something else, and not the least im–
portant:
If only our hard fate would spare
The children, and not recur!
The logic of abstract thought does not affect my feeling; but the
logic of history, which superstitiously bows before history, is just as
incapable of conquering it. You marshal against me not only the in–
herent rationality of the past, but also its continuation-the events of
the present day-as the ultimate and decisive argument. You summon
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