Every Month a Picture — Back to the Countryside

What does life want of her?
Yes, what does it want of her? The pale, drawn face, the withered frame, the eyes whose water has dried, the closed mouth, the tattered dress, the wounded feet... what does life want of all this?

And yet she lives... she lives in a barren field, like one of the crawling things, keeping company with silence and emptiness, feeding on the green grass — and she lives on.

I turned my gaze from her to a tree standing in the middle of a rugged field: an age-old tree, defying the reckless storms and the frost of winter, wringing out its drops into the burning jaws of summer; alone it struggles, and from the grains of dust it draws forth its survival...

And this worm crawling over the bare, harsh rocks, where there is neither water nor plant — and yet life is preserved for it and drives it onward: the worm lives on the chill of the stone and the dew of the night... and it endures.

So it is with the countryside in Lebanon, wrestling for its survival... It has none of the city's clamor and din, none of its social life or the scramble for work and the political squabbles; it has nothing of all this, because life in Lebanon has been heaped up entirely in one spot called Beirut. And yet the countryside endures — endures as the greatest witness to the will to live.

The factories are the sweat of life in the homeland; the workshops are the nation's nerves; the institutes its beating heart — and of all these the countryside in Lebanon is deprived, because a city called Beirut is elegant and alluring, and noisy, teeming with movement, where shoulders jostle and voices rise. And because Beirut is elegant and alluring, the small workman makes for it and the great official makes for it; it eats from the heart of the one and gnaws at the nerves of the other, each of them unaware — until, waking from his intoxication, he sees that he is like one who licks the whetstone, savoring the taste of blood without knowing it is the blood of his own heart.

My eye is on the countryside, my hand upon my heart, and my voice cries out to you for help, O men in authority in Lebanon... Return to the countryside, for it needs you. It is a sin that you should monopolize life and set it upon the palms of a handful of this homeland's sons, while every citizen has the right to live.

All that the countryside needs is for the way to be opened to the capacities of its individuals, that they may grow and be enlisted in the service of the individual and the community. It needs a campaign of guidance to teach its sons how to help themselves and develop their talents and their capacities, and then how to love their land and count it a piece of their being and their existence...

Do not be astonished if I tell you all this — for the beats of my heart mingle with the scratching of the pen.