Whirlpools: A Novel of Modern PolandSienkiewicz, Henryk
General
Whirlpools: A Novel of Modern Poland
Sienkiewicz, Henryk
Poland -- Fiction
"possesses at the same time too much and too little intelligence. For,
after all, to simply believe one must unreservedly shut the blinds of
his intellectual windows and not permit himself to peer through them;
and when he does open them he discovers only a starless night." For
this reason he envied those middle-aged persons, whose intelligence
reared mentally edifices upon unshaken dogmas, just as lighthouses are
built upon rocks in the sea. Dante could master the whole field of
knowledge of his time and yet, notwithstanding this, could traverse
hell, purgatory, and paradise. The modern man of learning could not
travel thus, for if he wished to pass in thought beyond the world of
material phenomenon, he would see that which we behold in Wuertz's
well-known painting, a decapitated head; that is, some element so
undefined that it is equivalent to nothing.
But the tragedy, according to Gronski, lay not only in the
inscrutability of the Absolute, in the impossibility of understanding
His laws, but also in the impossibility of agreeing on them and
acknowledging them from the view point of human life. There exist, of
course, evil and woe. The Old Testament explains them easily by the
state of almost continual rage of its Jah. "Domine ne in furore tuo
arguas me, neque in ira tua corripias me," and afterwards "saggittae
tuae infixae sunt mihi et confirmasti super me manuo tuum." And once
having accepted this blind fury and this "strengthening of the right
hand," it is easy to explain to one's self in a simple manner
misfortune. But already in the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes doubts
whether everything in the world is in order. The New Testament sees
evil in matter in contraposition to the soul; and that is clear.
However, viewing the matter, in the abstract, as everything is a close
chain of cause and effect, therefore everything is logical, and being
logical it cannot per se be either evil or good, but may appear
propitious or unfavorable in its relation to man. Besides, that which
we call evil or misfortune may, according to the absolute laws of
existence, and in its profundity, be wise and essential principles of
development, which are beyond human comprehension, and therefore
something which in itself is an advantageous phenomenon.
Yes, but in such case, whence does man derive the power to oppose his
individual thoughts and his concrete conceptions to this universal
logic? If everything is a delusion, why is the human mind a force,
existing, as it were, outside of the general laws of existence? There
is this something, unprecedented and at the same time tragical, that
man must be subjected to these laws and can protest against them. On
earth spiritual peace was enjoyed only by the gods, and is now only by
animals. Man is eternally struggling and crying veto, and such a veto
is every human tear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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