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288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
‘It is merely that we didn’t give the same meaning to the same words; we no longer speak the same language. Words always take on the colour of the deeds or the sacrifices they evoke.’
‘In the battles of our time I have always been on the side of the obstinate, on the side of those who have never despaired of a certain honour. I have shared and I still share many of the contemporary frenzies. But I have never been able to get myself to spit, as so many others do, on the word “honour.” Doubtless because I was and am aware of my human weaknesses and of my injustices, because I instinctively knew and still know that honour (like pity) is an unreasonable virtue that takes the place of justice and reason, which have become powerless. The man whose blood, extravagances, and frail heart lead him to the commonest weaknesses must rely on something in order to get to the point of respecting himself and hence of respecting others. This is why I loathe a certain self-satisfied virtue. I loathe society’s dreadful morality because it results, exactly like absolute cynicism, in making men despair and in keeping them from taking responsibility for their own life with all its weight of errors and greatness.’
‘I confess, insofar as I am concerned, that I cannot love all humanity except with a vast and somewhat abstract love. But I love a few men, living or dead, with such force and admiration that I am always eager to preserve in others what will someday perhaps make them resemble those I love. Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.’
‘Sometimes on a street corner, in the brief intervals of the long struggle that involves us all, I happen to think of all those places in Europe I know well. It is a magnificent land moulded by suffering and history. I relive those pilgrimages I once made with all the men of the West: the roses in the cloisters of Florence, the gilded bulbous domes of Krakow, the Hradschin and its dead palaces, the contorted statues of the Charles Bridge over the Ultava, the delicate gardens of Salzburg. All those flowers and stones, those hills and those landscapes where men’s time and the world’s time have mingled old trees and monuments—My memory has fused together such superimposed images to make a single face, which is the face of my true native land.
And then I feel a pang when I think that, for years now, your shadow has been cast over that vital, tortured face. Yet some of those places are ones that you and I saw together. It never occurred to me then that someday we should have to liberate them from you. And even now, at certain moments of rage and despair, I am occasionally sorry that the roses continue to grow in the cloister of San Marco and the pigeons drop in clusters from the Cathedral of Salzburg, and the red geraniums grow tirelessly in the little cemeteries of Silesia.—But at other moments, and they are the only ones that count, I delight in this. For all those landscapes, those flowers and those ploughed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood. That is the image on which I can close.’