Yes, we are in Lebanon — in this country singular in its traits, unique in its ever-surging vitality, its opposites so interacting that intellectual knots are forever being posed in it around the concepts of things, which the Lebanese mind, in its various currents, takes up and keeps working over in analysis and dissection. Blasts blow through it infected with the taints of backwardness and retreat, and a healing wind storms through it, its taints done away with by its openness to the vents that renew its climate; so it heals and recovers — and recovers so that it never emerges from this violent labor of the mind, as is its way each time, except standing upon the purest plane that thought has reached in the development of concepts and the advance of its findings.
Such was its way in the question of woman's political rights... Opinions clashed over this question in such a fashion that we were able to see in this country conceptions of things that cannot be measured by any fixed measures of which we could say that they are reactionary, or progressive, or stationary... We were given to hear opinions at the farthest extreme of backwardness, others in a strange rigidity, others in hesitation, and others launching out toward the loftiest measures mankind has attained, leaping toward renewal and pressing toward the realization of the fruits which the human mind's labors have gathered... Thus we saw at one pole a way of thinking suited to the mentality of the people of the jungle, and at another pole a thinking that rivals the loftiest conquests the mind has reached. And just as we are given to see every day in this country manifes
tations pointing to a far-reaching, spacious development — we see its shores billowing with bodies set loose in innocent, athletic release amid the flood of its suns' light, and we see its shining-white mountains teeming with slender figures skiing and dancing over its snows — we also see a retreat and a backwardness in scandalous contradiction to those manifestations of progress and civilization.
These two opposites go on living together and interacting, and Lebanon keeps its surging vitality thanks to the collision of these two opposites, until there springs from it at last something richer and more wonderful than any renewal imposed upon it as a rigid imposition emptied of every stirring human pulse. So it wins solutions that are the fruit of its intellectual friction in all its traits, and its new comes pulsing with vitality, firm of foundation, not to be uprooted by whims external to it, because no whims foreign to it brought it forth. Such was its way in the question of woman's rights in Lebanon, where all elements and tendencies had leave to say their word and to throw their weight into the balance; and so the thrust came out balanced against the weights placed in it by every tendency and every inclination, and Lebanon appeared with its true, innermost face — a face no less radiant, no less rich in the human element, than that of any country in the world.
We said that Lebanon has its own particular stamp, and this stamp may seem unique in its kind, strange in its sort, since it shows Lebanon as though it had one foot in the most advanced circles of civilization and the most pro
gressive of them, and another in the most retreating and backward, as one of the wits has said. For while we see the human element in it released in total release into the enjoyment of the delights of nature and the savoring of life's innocent pleasures, we see this element elsewhere bound in the chains of the village cast of mind or the mentality of clinging to traditions. That may seem true — and it is true; but the thing I wish to point to once again is that the wellspring of this country's unique vitality lies in this very trait, which is a spring of richness in the spontaneous, violent leaps and risings, when these entanglements within it end by being fused, as in a crucible, into an innermost Lebanese will that surges from the core of its being; and this will was never, in all its circles and its various parts, anything but an intense longing that Lebanon be always in the vanguard of the caravan of civilization and progress.
It remains for all the elements within it to grasp this truth deeply, and not to be dismayed if they touch upon some backwardness, or if some hesitation appears to them in realizing what accords with the new in the world. For Lebanon must find its road by itself, and the leap must surge from its core; and it is open — rarely has it lagged in leaping, each time the soundness of that leap was understood. For that reason the dialogue of minds must remain standing in Lebanon, and this dialogue must not be halted by imposing what comes from outside as an imposition that freezes its mental labor.
Let us then always remember that we are in Lebanon, and that this country cannot be driven arbitrarily toward anything whatever; just as we must remember, too, that we can any day pose in this Lebanon any problem of thought, because we know with certainty