The Little Review, May 1914 (Vol. 1., No. 3)Various
General
The Little Review, May 1914 (Vol. 1., No. 3)
Various
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- Periodicals
The drama audience might have been dolls, for all they appeared to
understand what was going on. One of them went up to Miss Goldman
afterward and tried, almost petulantly, to explain why she believed in
property and wealth. She was utterly serious. No one could have
convinced her that there was any humor in the situation; that she might
as well try to work up a fervor of war enthusiasm in Carnegie as to
expect Emma Goldman to sympathize in the sanctity of property. The
second audience, after listening to a talk on anti-Christianity, got to
its feet and asked intelligent questions. Men with the faces of fanatics
and martyrs waved their arms in their excitement pro and con; some one
tried to prove that Nietzsche had an unscientific mind; a suave lawyer
stated that Miss Goldman was profoundly intellectual, but that her talk
was destructive--to which she replied that it would require another
lawyer to unravel his inconsistency; and then some one established
forcibly that the only real problem in the universe was that of three
meals a day.
Most people who read and think have become enlightened about anarchism.
They know that anarchists are usually timid, thoughtful, unviolent
people; that dynamite is a part of their intellectual, not their
physical, equipment; and that the goal for which they are
striving--namely, individual human freedom--is one for which we might
all strive with credit. But for the benefit of those who regard Emma
Goldman as a public menace, and for those who simply don't know what to
make of her--like that fashionable feminine audience--it may be
interesting to look at her in a new way.
To begin with, why not take her quite simply? She's a simple person.
She's natural. In any civilization it requires genius to be really
simple and natural. It's one of the most subtle, baffling, and agonizing
struggles we go through--this trying to attain the quality that ought to
be easiest of all attainment because we were given it to start with.
What a commentary on civilization!--that one can regain his original
simplicity only through colossal effort. Nietzsche calls it the three
metamorphoses of the spirit: "how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel
a lion, and the lion at last a child."
And Emma Goldman has struggled through these stages. She has taken her
"heavy load-bearing spirit" into the wilderness, like the camel; become
lord of that wilderness, captured freedom for new creating, like the
lion; and then created new values, said her Yea to life, like the child.
Somehow Zarathustra kept running through my mind as I listened to her
that afternoon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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