CONTENTS
Danube
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Author: Magris Claudio
Year: 1986
The discomfort of civilisation, as Freud has revealed in masterly fashion, arises from an incurable contradiction. Civilisation and morals are based on a distinction that is necessary and extremely difficult to build on: that between men and animals. It is impossible to live without destroying animal life, even if only those minimal beings which are too small for us to see, and it is impossible to recognise universal and inviolable rights for animals, and in Kantian style to consider every animal to be an end rather than a means. Brotherly solidarity can embrace humanity, but there it stops. This impossibility creates an inevitable split between the human world and the natural world, and it forces culture, which struggles against the sufferings inflicted on mankind, to construct its case upon the suffering of animals, attempting to mitigate it but resigned to not being able to eliminate it. The irredeemable woe of animals, that obscure people who follow our existence like a shadow, throws on us the whole weight of original sin.
But even were the trumpet in Fidelio to sound, liberated humanity on the top floor of the skyscraper in which it lived would have to be mindful of all the humiliated, sorrowing storeys beneath... The lowest cellar – the foundation of the entire building where on the topmost storey we may hear a Mozart concerto or view picture by Rembrandt – is the dwelling of animal suffering, where flows the blood of the slaughterhouses.
The desire to march with the times, to be swept along in their procession, is the regressive yearning to rid oneself of all choice and all conflict, in short of freedom, and to find innocence in the conviction that it is impossible to be guilty because it is impossible to choose and act independently.
(Marcus Aurelius)
He defended the Empire but... he knew that to defend the Empire was only his duty and not an absolute value.
He cultivated the ultimate and essential things, aware that a person is made up of the values in which he believes, and which stamp his features with the imprint of their nobility or vulgarity, as the case may be. The spirit draws upon the images which form in it, he wrote, and the value of every person is in strict proportion to the value of the things to which he has given importance. This is perhaps the most blinding intuition of the essence of a man, the key to his history and his nature: we are what we believe in...
... the Future which drags us all along in its wake...
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