PARTISAN REVIEW
ping his head in
his
cloak; above all, Jesus went apart into the
desert for forty days. What do we not owe to Newton! Well, when
someone, amazed that he had succeeded in reducing the innumer–
able phenomena of the physical world to such a precise and simple
system, asked
him
how he had succeeded in doing so, he replied
ingenuously:
<CNocte dieque incubando,"
"turning them over day
and night"-words behind which we glimpse vast and profound
withdrawals into the self.
In the world today, gentlemen, a great thing is dying-it is
truth. Without a certain margin of tranquillity, truth succumbs.
Hence, faced with the incitements to
alteraci6n
which today
reach us from every point of the compass and from every depart–
ment of life, I believed that I should begin this course of lectures,
should put before them by way of prologue, a sketch of this
doctrine of withdrawal into the self, even though it be a hurried
sketch, even though I have been unable to dwell on such parts of
it as I would have wished to, and have had to pass over others in
silence-for example, I have not been able to point out that with–
drawal into the self, like everything human, has sex, that there is a
masculine form of it, and another which is feminine. Which can–
not be otherwise, in view of the fact that woman is not
himself
but
herself.
Similarly, the man of the East withdraws into the self in a
different way from the man of the West. The Occidental does it in
clarity of mind. Remember Goethe's lines:
I, I confess, am of the race of those
Who from the dark aspire to clarity.
Europe and America mean the attempt to live by clear ideas,
not by myths. Because clear ideas have ceased to exist, the European
now feels lost and demoralized.
Machiavelli-not to be confused with "Machiavellianism"–
tells us neatly that when an army is demoralized and scatters, losing
its formations, there is only one salvation:
<CRitornare al segno,"
<Cto return to the banner,"
gather beneath its folds, and regroup the
scattered hosts beneath that sign. Europe and America must also
ritornare al segno
of clear ideas. The new generations, who delight
in clean bodies and pure acts, must integrate themselves in the clear
idea, in the strictly constructed idea, which is not redundant, which
