The Awaited Leader

I saw him deep in thought, gazing into the distance, and in his eyes the image of a dream that had settled there until it took on the shape of a truth that cannot be shaken.

In his brow is the resolve of the rocks, and in his gaze the calm of lakes on a sultry summer evening.
On his lips the delicacy of austerity and the heat of faith; in his face the gauntness of hermits and the pallor of worshippers.
I saw him dream without losing himself in the dream. And I saw him work until he drowned in his work and forgot himself and all around him. Then he rises and goes where he may join the people; he sits with them, and he listens to the speakers, listening long. Then he speaks, and sparks fly from his eyes and flame from his lips, as though his soul were gathering itself upon his lips. He is carried away in speech, and eyes and hearts are led captive to him, and faces kindle with the ray of faith. He is with the people, yet he is not of them; he is a part of their souls, and for all that he differs from them, for he is of a weave all his own. I tried to speak to him, but he was occupied away from me, averse to talk. And I tried to read his soul and his presence, and behold, it spoke of him in a language more eloquent than words.

I grew up in a house of plenty, yet I lived the life of ascetics.
I kept company with people as I kept company with books, and I built my life out of people and out of books.
My mother's rage taught me silence, and my father's lying taught me truthfulness and the worship of truth.
I saw the people around me worshipping money, and I loathed it.
I saw them smiling in hypocrisy, so I refrained from smiling. And I saw them showing other than what was in their souls, so I concealed what was in my soul and hated display.
I saw them envying one another, hating one another, coveting what belongs to others, so I killed in myself envy and hatred and lust.
I saw them bowing their foreheads to the very ground before the foreign colonizer and before every man of money or power. So I turned away from the strangers and kept far from the men of money and power.
I saw them forming parties and organizing propaganda—between an exploiting shepherd and witless sheep—so I fled from the parties and took refuge with God from names.

Their souls hungered for the good things of the world, and for their sake they spent the water of the face and the sweat of the brow. They said, we gather for our children; so my soul turned in disgust from children, and I resolved to leave behind me no parasites eating from their fathers' toil. I freed myself of every desire and every passion, save the passion of pain at seeing misery and injustice and selfishness and ignorance raise for themselves thrones among men and cast thick veils over their eyes. I kept company with the liberators of mankind and its leaders of ages past, and I found that they liberated men only after they had liberated their own souls and killed the beast lurking within them. They worked without despair, and they died for the sake of a distant dream.

Here the speech broke off. I looked around me, and behold, I had been reading in the unseen, and the man I had beheld a moment before had vanished from my sight. I gazed about, bewildered; but a voice whispered in my ear, from a direction I could not tell: "The man you saw is the awaited leader. But... you have seen only a dream, for that human being has not yet been born."