The
right of individuals to forge
their own destiny will yet again be restricted and challenged. Public
peril will be invoked, or the general interest, or even the
preservation of humanity itself. Upright citizens will
launch indignant protests against this indefensible activity, this epidemic
anarchy with its aim of rescuing
each person from mankind’s common lot and creating for him an
individual paradise, this deflection of thought processes which will doubtless
be labeled intellectual
Malthusianism in the near future.
What splendid ravages: the
principle of usefulness will become foreign to all those who practice this superior vice. For them, it will at last no longer be a
question of applying the
mind: seeing its boundaries dissolve into
the distance they will share their ecstasy with all that is ardent and unsatisfied on
this earth. Young people will plunge
passionately into this serious,
unprofitable game. It will pervert the
course of their lives.
The
Faculties will be deserted, the laboratories
closed down. The very idea of
armies, families, professors, will become inconceivable. Then, in the face of this ever-increasing
disaffection of social life, a great conspiracy of all the dogmatic and realist forces of
the world will be organized against the phantom of illusions. It will win, this coalition of powers
dedicated to the
principles of why-not and making-the-best-of-it. But it will be the last crusade of the mind. And for this battle that is lost in advance,
I recruit you today, adventurous, grave
hearts, contemptuous of victory, who search the night for an abyss into which to
hurl yourselves. Come, the roster is open. Queue up at this window, please.
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (Le Paysan
de Paris), translated by Simon Watson-Taylor, London,
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1971.
No comments:
Post a Comment