This Sick Head

Beirut — this sick head looming up from the shoulder of the nation, growing more swollen and bloated day after day.

Beirut the capital, the marketplace of livelihood, the seat of government and the high councils of the judiciary, the spacious arena of the professions — of doctors, pharmacists, and lawyers.

Beirut, which carries in its heart two universities instead of one university, and dozens of schools instead of one school. Down to it comes the mountain villager, to earn his bread, to trade, to take employment, to go to law, to seek a cure, to study, and to take his leisure; and its heart, pulsing with alluring superficiality, wins him over and keeps him there, and he exchanges his temporary stay for a long residence, in which he loses the traditions of the mountain — frankness, pride, and dignity — and acquires a taste for fawning and flattery, for the "cleverness" of plunder and greed, and sinks ever deeper into the love of private interest, until he makes it, for himself, before everything and above everything.

This city, which has robbed the village of its youth, its vigor, and its power to build, speaks for the opinion of Lebanon, decides the fate of the whole, signs and reviews, commands and forbids, remembers the Mountain whenever a new electoral wave appears on the horizon, and denies it the blessing of building and construction, of education and refinement. If the villager falls ill and does not save himself by seeking treatment in the capital, he perishes; if he cries out in his isolation without reaching the trumpets of the capital, his cry is lost in a valley; if his vines and his olives wither and the city does not bestow the remedy upon him, he dies of hunger; if his land turns barren and the sky withholds its abundant rains, the capital city imagines him living in plenty, because it enjoys plenty itself; and if the cold pinches him, for want of clothing or a shortage of fuel for fire and heating, the capital counts him as enjoying warmth and dress — because the capital's winter is spring, and because the corners of its shops and the halls of its customhouses are heaped with beautiful, costly goods.

What harm to the city if the villager dies, and the people of the Mountain die out? The Mountain is mute: it expresses no opinion, joins no demonstration, raises no petition of protest, pays no visits to the representatives of states, and has no newspaper to publish its complaint and give voice to its ailments.

This capital, which is trying to strangle the village — were it a model city, the villager might console himself with the sight of moral values built upon the absorption of his labor. But it is a capital racing to put distance between itself and the foundations of virtue and beauty. The more it grows, the more we see in its growth a piling-up of deformities. Its new buildings carry in their foundations no rule of sound engineering, no beautification that taste can savor and the eye rest upon; its roads are narrow and crooked, its streets crowded and filthy, its gardens belong to the world of illusion, and the level of its public health is a general blow against every healthy person who would live there. Here are the swarms of flies settling on the meat, the greens, the fruit, and the milk, and overrunning the houses; here is the company of rats that has taken a progressive step, shed its cowardice and its shame, and begun to accompany human beings along their roads, into their bedchambers and their offices. And here is the mass of people conducting itself in the breadth of the street as though the street were a corner of its own house, or a handkerchief whose expanse has widened to receive spittle, cast-off peels, and the leavings of food.

Only yesterday the heart of the capital held a hundred thousand inhabitants, and five to ten percent of that number slipped daily on the filth of the street, breaking an arm or a leg — or rather, splitting open a head or wrenching a neck. Today the city's population has passed the half million, the situation remains just as it was yesterday, and the crowding has made the muddy clay muddier still. Have the worthies of the capital studied the rate of daily accidents whose victims are the company of the innocent? Have the swarms of beggars caught their eye? Have they compelled the commercial houses and the industrial workshops to bring welfare facilities within the sphere of their operations? Here are the houses of broadcasting and publishing, multiplying their chatter on every subject while neglecting the subjects of art, health, and society.

A capital that lacks the beauty of art, the blessing of health, and the ray of virtue, that sacrifices its extremities to feed in its heart the worm of selfishness, of individual interest, of irresponsibility — its destiny is strange and wondrous indeed, so long as it keeps its course toward a future of quantity instead of quality, and so long as its incense rises before the altars of power and blind superficiality.

It is time, O capital, for you to labor and bring forth this violent awakening: to admit into your heart the measure of values, to feed your own self upon it, and to plant its sound seedlings.