The Sacred Opium!

A rejoinder to Mr. Rafiq Maalouf's article on the profession of letters, entitled: "This Opium!"

Among the problems of literature in this country is that you can hardly hear a single man of letters — when you ask him about his profession, its sorrows, its hardships, and its pleasures — without seeing disgust plain upon his lips!

And among its problems, too, is that everything said of it — that it is wearying and grinding; a delicious and poisonous opium; a beautiful, seducing devil; and that, if its practitioner grasps its sacred mission and vows his whole being to it, it impoverishes him and leaves him housebound through the cold nights, the flagstones of his house without so much as a mat... all of it is true beyond dispute.

For literature among us, and in the whole East, "does not feed a man bread"; and yet those who throng upon this greedy, dry-bellied scorpion grow more numerous with every morning! Has poverty in our days acquired charm and seduction to such a degree..?

The truth is that in the pursuit of literature there is, for a certain class of people, a pleasure above all pleasure, resembling the pleasure of hashish, of sensual numbness, and of "opium," in Mr. Rafiq Maalouf's phrase... And it is a pleasure which, once it mounts its man, cleaves to him even in his dreams, and clings to his plate and his cup and the face of his wife and his child... Hence it has become clear to the clear-sighted among us — to those whom the pleasure of literature and its infernal rapture have not mounted — that the best remedy for the rising generation, seduced by the virginity of the pen and the gleam of the letter, is that we bar them from

literature by means of science — science alone, which yields sound logical judgment upon things and a development of the ways of life; then will the nation profit by its youth, their profit from their knowledge will increase, and gain will come to them through its widest gate!"

So says one whose eyelashes have fluttered over letters through long, sleepless nights that knew no drowsing — devouring letters, and being devoured by lights and rhymes...

So says a poet!!

As though science were the whole of life, and as though profit came only through the sciences — or as though life were nothing but profit...

Our land, Rafiq Maalouf, is a poet...

And a poet-land in this world is a grain of ruby, and a sapling in a soil that loves song and inspires it; it lays into the earth a good that a thousand soils cannot lay — soils with a rasp in their voice, whose children's hearts are coffins.

And what use is it to us to drive our young away from literature, or to drive literature away from them, if the "craft" lives on in their blood..? This bewitching color, this mirage — it deceives! It is opium, and you yourself have said so... Then how shall you find deliverance from opium, when it is glued fast to your ribs and will not be pried loose from them??

Were it a hashish that sinks a man down to the apprehension of filth, the advice would have been gladly received... But it is sacred, O poet; in its taste is the savor of triumph, and in its absorption something divine!!!

"Literature, in this East, is a bringer of poverty, an occasion for insult, and a byword of contempt..."

... Yes, so it is; and poverty does not disgrace, my friend; and the insult debases none but him who spits it; and whoever scorns a man of letters walks the earth accursed all his life...

I am the slave of the true man of letters, the man of letters in the arteries — his slave in his rapture, when he sets down beauty, and creates sweetness and bounty and blessing, and touches with his imagination a woman whose body his imagination has embodied in bewitching melodies...

The slave of the man of letters worthy of that name, on the day he eats his own deprivation and creates out of his deprivation what the demigods among us cannot!!!

And our man of letters, O my poet, is half a god...

Nay — if he wills, and if the word in his blood eats of him and feeds him — he is a whole god, almighty, who creates his universe and weaves for it its lives before six mornings have dawned upon him...

... This is a word that leapt to the head in a fevered hour, among the noblest hours of a lifetime. And my hand would not have set it down did I not know that in your veins are your words, and in your heart your rhymes, and that in truth you felt no regret for "the hours I squandered composing verse at school while the mathematics and natural-science classes were in session, in the days of empty enthusiasm and short sight!"

And that the enthusiasm was not empty — rather it alone lifted you up to life's supreme pleasure and the rapture of winning a melody... and that the sight reached far beyond the confines of the folly of dry figures, and of driveling nonsense whose imbecility none but its own people perceive...