Here they will pass again, day after day, year after year, all the
prisoners of rooms will pass with their kind of eternity. In the
twilight when everything fades, they will sit down near the light, in
the room full of haloes. They will drag themselves to the window's
void. Their mouths will join and they will grow tender. They will
exchange a first or a last useless glance. They will open their arms,
they will caress each other. They will love life and be afraid to
disappear. Here below they will seek a perfect union of hearts. Up
above they will seek everlastingness among the shades and a God in the
clouds.
. . . . .
The monotonous murmur of voices comes through the wall steadily, but I
do not catch what is being said. I am like anybody else in a room.
I am lost, just as I was the evening I came here when I took possession
of this room used by people who had disappeared and died--before this
great change of light took place in my destiny.
Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps because of my lofty pain, I
imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one
is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his
entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh,
gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it
would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus
because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.
There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of
the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of
living.
There is no mysterious fire. I have stolen the truth. I have stolen
the whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic things, pure
things, and I was right. I have seen shameful things, and I was right.
And so I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving
respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use the expression that
deceit and religious blasphemy employ.
. . . . .
Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple
Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our
doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell
everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will
be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the
more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain
memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes
I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece.
Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so
strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a
forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried
out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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