Latins. Latins? And why, if we are really Berbers, must we not feel
and assert that we are Berbers, and why must not the poetry in which
we endeavour to give expression to our sorrows and our consolations
conform to the Berber æsthetic?
The only way of entering into vital relations with another is the
aggressive way; only those succeed in mutually penetrating one another,
in forming a spiritual brotherhood, who strive to subjugate one another
spiritually, whether in the case of individuals or of peoples. It is
only when I strive to put my spirit into the spirit of my neighbour
that I receive my neighbour’s spirit in mine. The apostle is blessed
in receiving in himself the souls of those whom he converts; in this
consists the nobility of proselytizing.
No, none of this _laissez-faire_ and _laissez-aller_--don’t let us
shrug our shoulders at the ideas, still less at the feelings, of
others, but rather try to wound them. It is thus and only thus that
they will wound ours and keep them awake within us. For my part I know
that those to whom I owe most are those who have acted as if they
rejected, who have wished to reject, what I offered to them. The deep
moral life is a life of aggression and mutual penetration. Everyone
must endeavour to make others in his own image and likeness, as God is
said to have made us in His image and likeness.
The condemnation of him who tries to mould himself upon another lies in
the fact that he will cease to be himself without succeeding in being
the other whom he takes as his model, and so he will be nobody.
Unquestionably there is something, there are many things, in modern
European culture and in the modern European spirit that it behoves us
to receive into ourselves in order that we may convert them into our
flesh, just as we receive the flesh of various kinds of animals into
our body and convert it into our flesh. With the brains of oxen I
nourish my brain, with the ribs of hogs I make my heart beat, with fish
and birds I feed my body so that my spirit can plunge into the deeps
and swim in them and ascend to the heights and fly there. And must we
not eat the modern European spirit? Yes, but we first kill these oxen,
hogs, fishes and birds, upon which we nourish ourselves, imposing our
will upon them, and we must deal with this spirit in the same way
before eating it.
I am profoundly convinced, arbitrarily of course--the more profoundly,
the more arbitrarily, as is always the case when truths of faith
are concerned--I am profoundly convinced that the real and deep
Europeanization of Spain, that is to say, our digestion of that part of
the European spirit which it is possible to convert into our spirit,
will not begin until we strive to impose ourselves upon the European
spiritual order, to make the Europeans swallow our spirit, that
which is genuinely ours, in exchange for theirs, until we strive to
Spaniardize Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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