accompany him no longer,--it is time to undervalue what he has valued,
to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with Caesar to take
in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All these
will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile." Dear
to us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend with them are
a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life;--but
dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life:
they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby
supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us
to new and unattempted performances.
As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes
to be convicted of his error and to come to himself,--so he wishes that
the same healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate
his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his
selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important
benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform,
that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so that
his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments of
ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do
you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a
benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me; and surely the
greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved
by you that I should say, 'Take me and all mine, and use me and mine
freely to your ends'! for I could not say it otherwise than because a
great enlargement had come to my heart and mind, which made me superior
to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our
little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which
they have in our experience yielded us, although we confess that our
being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great; we desire
to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and
make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your
project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race,
understand well that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into
your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with
a belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to
learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring
us to prison, or to worse extremity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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