Βιβλία σαν το «Οι Εξομολογήσεις»

The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing.

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.

But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin.

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

Ἀλλὰ σύ, φίλε, δὲν προσεῖχες τότε εἰς τὰ τετριμμένα αὐτά, ἀλλ᾿ ἐφθόνεις μᾶλλον τοὺς μικροὺς δεκαετεῖς παῖδας, τοὺς ἀνασηκώνοντας τὴν περισκελίδα ὣς τὸν μηρόν, φέροντας τὰ πέδιλα εἰς τὸ θυλάκιον καὶ θαλασσώνοντας ὑπὲρ τὸ γόνυ εἰς τὸ κῦμα. Ἔβλεπες ἔξαφνα ἕνα τούτων νὰ κύπτῃ νὰ συλλαμβάνῃ μὲ τὴν παλάμην μικρὸν ὀκταπόδιον, νὰ τὸ δαγκάνῃ εἰς τὸν λαιμόν, ν᾿ ἀγωνίζεται ν᾿ ἀποσπάσῃ ἀπὸ τὸν καρπὸν τῆς χειρός του τοὺς μυζητῆρας, νὰ τρέχῃ εἰς τὴν ἄμμον καὶ νὰ τὸ κοπανίζῃ γενναίως εἰς τὸν πρῶτον λίθον τὸν ὁποῖον θὰ εὕρισκε, λείψανον παρασυρθέντος ἀπὸ τὰ κύματα ξηρολιθίνου περιβόλου κήπου ἢ ἐρείπιον πάλαι ποτὲ ὑπαρξάσης προκυμαίας. Καὶ ἡ μήτηρ σου ἡ φιλότεκνος ὄχι μόνον δὲν σοῦ ἐπέτρεπε νὰ τρέχῃς, ὅπως ἄλλοι, ἀνυπόδητος καὶ σύ, ἀλλ᾿ ἀπῄτει νὰ φορῇς καὶ κάλτσες. Ὁποῖα δεσμὰ παιδαγωγικῆς δουλοσύνης!