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Rolland, Romain, 1866-1944

"Clerambault The Story of an Independent Spirit During the War"

The light
that your weak eyes have seen has shone also for others. See where now
the Great Bear inclines to the horizon,--millions of eyes are looking
at it, perhaps; but you cannot see them, only the far-off light makes
a bond between their sight and yours."
The solitude of the mind is only a painful delusion; it has no real
existence, for even the most independent of us are members of a
spiritual family. This community of spirit has no relation to time
or space; its elements are dispersed among all peoples and all ages.
Conservatives see them in the past, but the revolutionists and the
persecuted look to the future for them. Past and future are not less
real than the immediate present, which is a wall beyond which the calm
eyes of the flock can see nothing. The present itself is not what the
arbitrary divisions of states, nations, and religions would have us
believe. In our time humanity is a bazaar of ideas, unsorted and
thrown together in a heap, with hastily constructed partitions between
them, so that brothers are separated from brothers, and thrown in with
strangers. Every country has swallowed up different races, not formed
to think and act together; so that each one of these spiritual
families, or families-in-law, which we call nations, comprises
elements which in fact form part of different groups, past, present,
or future.


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