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PARTISAN REVIEW
wouldn't need to constantly create form in order to combat chaos
and nothingness . We are constantly threatened by chaos and
nothingness because life as such is an enormous multiplicity.
My
personal feeling about the twentieth century is that we are sub–
merged. The things that happened in this century in the sense of
horror and heroism escape our thinking and formulations. The cen–
tury is largely untold. The same applies to our human lives. We are
in the power of forces which escape our words and our records .
Maybe that is why today everybody wants to write a novel about
their life . As far as form is concerned everything in human life is
form or giving form ; we enter into a relationship with the world
primarily through language composed of words, or signs, or lines, or
colors, or shapes ; we do not enter the world through a direct rela–
tionship. Our human nature consists of everything being mediated;
we are part of civilization ; we are part of the human world . Writing
is a constant struggle, an attempt to translate as many elements of
reality as possible into form.
RB:
What are your thoughts about the form of conduct, for example
ethical conduct or heroic conduct?
eM:
Action is probably important, but I am not a man of action and
I shouldn't pronounce myself as such. In action there are also many
delusions.
RB:
I think of conduct in terms of motivational behavior. Socrates'
death is an example of heroic conduct. Do you think that Socrates'
death expressed more than could ever be expressed in writings of the
Socratic dialogues?
eM:
Socrates , with his life, wrote a kind of a metaphor. Undoubt–
edly we can find many other similar examples which have a sort of
permanent existence in the life of mankind. The question is to what
extent there is a mythical transformation of acts of that sort. Maybe
mythical transformations are necessary.
RB:
What do you mean by mythical transformation?
eM:
The book ofJ ob is centered around the suffering of an innocent
man , and the meaning of suffering. Maybe the meaning of the suf–
fering of Job is to create a parable-material for the Book of Job
which transforms mythically the story of Job .
RB:
Does the answer that emerges from the Book ofJob , that we can
only know fragments of reality while God knows the totality of real–
ity, satisfy you?
eM:
Yes. This is a question which I touch upon in my book, even
invoking Orwell. I speak in my book about the question of the past.
If
the past exists only in human memories, or disappears with
