708
PARTISAN REVIEW
as long as those hills, those olive trees and cypresses, that sky and that
light continued to be there." There is nothing very remarkable about
such a thought, except that it should be uttered as an attempt to dispel
the fear that has come to stay with us. It struck me as being the exact
reverse of Keats's celebrated exclamation, and far more melancholy,
since it meant resigning oneself not to destruction so much as to the
inarticulate. Because, certainly, the light of Attica, Mount Olympus and
the plain of Thessaly is still there, but the Greek people have not yet
been granted by history a chance to reweave anything like the fabric of
the social life in an Attic borough of the sixth century B.C. Which is
where the Parthenon sprang from, and not the sun.
But I think I know the trend of thought that led this French poet
to rate the Tuscan landscape so high as to attribute to it an almost divine
power of self-sufficiency and creation. Nature in Italy is essentially un–
romantic and reassuring, a constant and all-pervading suggestion that
the only enigma about life is how to harmonize the rhythm of one's per–
sonal existence with that of nature, and that to create without effort, if
not without pain, is man's plain task. The elements are all there at hand,
from the soil to the aptitudes and forms of the body, from the light and
the colors, to the functions of animal life. Piero della Francesca's is the
light of early spring mastered once and for all, made into an element of
pure form. But it is, after all, only a pale reflection of the sky anyone
can see, just before dawn over the Tuscan Appennines. Which is the
same sky that shines over the most thankless toil and allots a moment of
joy even to the most miserable. Hence flows naturally the seemingly reas–
suring thought that all traces of Piero's invention might disappear but
the source of his and of myriads of possible figurations-the light-will
last forever.
Animal fear is a reflex. And looking to nature for a reassurance
against the apocalyptic solicitations of our time is a form of reverie.
Generally speaking what we have come to expect from the contemporary
intellectual is not the nerve to offer total answers and all-comprehensive
perspectives. Only the fanatics and the lunatics stilI seem to have the
courage to make such attempts.
Having gone through the experience of fanaticism and having found
it deceptive, Raymond Abellio has frankly chosen lunacy. Intellectual
lunacy, of course; that is, a kind of sullen overbidding on ideas. This
manner of speculation is consigned to two novels
(Heureux les pacifiques
and
Les yeux d'Ezechiel sont ouverts)
and a theoretical essay, all pub–
lished by Gallimard. Which is probably the most significant fact
a~out
Abellio as a social phenomenon. Before the war his books would have
