Light

Those arrogant ones who look at the sun and say, "These poor rays are worth nothing," deserve to have their delusion scattered by a single thread or beam of it. But... let us leave them be, for their gaze turns back abased and weary before a spark of light... And this radiance, which parts the dye of night, is worthy of instilling in a man's soul the subtlest sensations and the loftiest emotions...

However our life may be — black and somber, as if cut from the murk of the darkest hour before dawn; however pitch-dark it may be, as if a piece of the night were crouching upon our souls — within the curve of the ribs there is a heart we carry... and it is the guiding lamp when the waymarks grow scarce and the features of the road are clouded over.

I am now a stranger in my exile, feeling a loneliness — a chilled, cold loneliness... and I feel a tightening whose source is weariness and whose cause is tedium... In my soul a sharp crisis is churning. The crisis of bitter patience... It is the legend of Tantalus, the legend of one who is never quenched, whom satiety and quenching can never reach. In my soul are thirst and hunger, and in my heart a longing and an anguish; and I do not wish to take refuge in the storehouse of words — I prefer to give my soul free rein and feather its wing, so that it may soar in its own skies, where memories grow sweet, hopes come alive, the burning is put out, and a wing sprouts for every passing fancy, and every thought has hands that grasp, feet that strive, and eyes that see.

We are going tomorrow, leaving this bewilderment, parting from this doubt; no darkness, however long it lasts, shall tighten our bonds... We are going to the mountaintop, hurrying it on toward the first heralds of morning... The red-tiled houses jostle before us. And the fertile plains stretch out beneath our feet — greenery has clothed them in a beautiful splendor...

And the roosters have begun, in the morning, to usher in the glad tidings of morning, carrying life along with them.. My slumbering, dormant soul joins with people and with nature... On my eyelids are the traces of a chronic sleeplessness; I wait and I watch... But the silence that precedes the storm does not enfold me, nor has my soul reached that pitch of tension... Yet I feel that I need something to restore hope to me and summon me to rest..

I need a light... a light to flood my tired, worn face, so that my spirit may revive and my soul rise, and certainty return to me that darkness has a weaker sway than light, and that nothingness can never rival existence.

I roam the worlds of thought and strain my ears to catch its speech, and before me stretch the green plains.. Greenery makes souls tremble; it is the daughter of spring, where nature meets again after separation and hardship — it is the meeting of the rays at their converging point, and man cannot but respond to this marvelous harmony... for he is a string in the throat of nature, and a note in a song that is not yet complete, that has not reached its end. Let the soul bear its burden, for in its pausing there is a rapture that rises toward the future, certain that its existence demands sacrifice and redemption.

The birds may sing, and I turn away from hearing them. The morning breezes may blow, and I am heedless of breathing them in. But my whole being trembles at a "light" from this sun — the sun that is poor in the eyes of some, dear and precious in ours.. that light which calls the living to work and to life.

I do not know who it was that said, as he lay dying: "Light the lamps." How terrifying is the darkness of night if a man does not believe in the alternation of night and day... It is no great matter that night should enfold us and darkness wrap us round, so long as we believe in the eternal truth, and so long as we break through so that the light which illumines the darkness may burst forth.

Before my desk crouch the remains of scattered papers — remnants of words my pen traced in one of the soul's moods. In this life, for all how little it holds of anything of value, there are moments that have slipped free from the tether of whatever besets them; they are poor lines that want correcting, and need more than one stroke of a brush that works with patience and deliberation... These lines await the light so that they may live with others, for they have no value whatever so long as they lie sleeping in the bellies of paper... They need someone to carry them and give them voice as speech — whispered and faint at one moment, resounding and thundering at another. They need a ray from a soul to grant them life.

The sun will rise upon the living and return in its rounds each day, and there will always remain in the world those whose minds its radiance does not seize, whom no ray of it can stir. And there will remain, and there will multiply, the likes of that poet who said:

They look at the sun;
those arrogant ones,
and they say:
this poor sun is worth nothing.
And I would have been ready
to give a whole world
for one ray
traced upon the wall.