man gives you from his last vein,

Broadcast from the Lebanese station...

from his heart, from his whole self — and you will not take. What miser on earth are you, O miser in taking...?!

Freely we have given — so take freely, you misers... You have heard, among the things you have heard, O microphone, of Lebanon, the land of knowledge —

cradler of thought, in the days when thought was an orphan crawling by the roadside... Lebanon... layer of the first stone in the edifice of civiliza-tion... Lebanon.

But you have not heard, O microphone, of what knowledge suffers in Lebanon. We live in legends — in the tales of the letters of the alphabet, carried by a man of Lebanon to the world... and in the tales of the first timber that put out to sea, at the hands of a Lebanese sailor...

And we forget, O microphone, the Lebanese book that no Lebanese reads...

And we forget the Lebanese house, in which there is not the shadow of a book — a book for a child, or a paper for a woman... And we forget these voices that rise out of you, and whose echoes die within your dry iron ribs!!

As though the letter in this coun-try were a burden upon the people: the newspaper perishes of hunger, and bears favor upon favor, and is handed back once with thanks, and many times without thanks.

Or as though the letter were a fetter which the writers bind onto people's necks — when the writer meant it as nothing but a light to wipe the film from the eyes... and a hammer with which to strike the chains from the necks of slaves. And the book has become a hand stretched out toward the people, gleaning the beggar's piasters of the passersby...

...Be quiet... I fancy you are open-ing your mouth to fling a dreadful saying in my face... Be quiet — I have guessed it, I have guessed...

In your conscience you hold that we are ranters, losing the people in a tinsel of words which we hunt from here and from there...

And in your conscience you hold that we are liars, calling the people to the temple while we revile the truth...!

And in your conscience you hold that we are "thieves," raiding the rich and stripping them of their goods...

And in your conscience... that we are "parasites," coming to banquets without invitation, or coming at the tail of an invited guest... And you know many of our stories, for you are a prying neighbor; you know which of us comes and goes, to this house, and goes and comes...

And in your conscience: that we have written neither fire nor

light... Have your letters blotted out a world, and created a world? — you say... You write water and hypocrisy... firewood and stubble, and neither your firewood nor your stubble will catch fire...

And in your conscience, O micro-phone, that people's souls have sickened of us — we who chew our words, drawing them out, on history, and literature, and art, and taste... and on everything...

Be quiet... do not say all this — for I have guessed you, and you have guessed me...