June 15, 2017

On Eminescu and Our Purpose

If everything had a purpose and nothing were by chance, then probably our only purpose as a small people with a grey destiny and a “minor” culture was to make possible the appearance of the following lines:

“In the beginning, when being was not, nor non-being, / when all was want of life and want of will, / when nothing hid itself, though all was hidden… / when, penetrated by Himself, the impenetrable rested.

Was there an abyss? a chasm? Was there a wide waste of water? / There was no world conceived, nor mind to conceive it, / for there was a darkness like a sea without a ray, / yet neither anything to see, nor eye to see it.

The shadow of things unmade had not begun to unfold, / and, at peace within itself, eternal peace held sway…

But of a sudden a point stirs… the first and the only. Behold it, / how out of chaos it makes a mother, and itself becomes the Father.

That point of movement, far feebler than a bead of foam, / is the boundless master over the boundaries of the world…

From then the eternal mist parts into strips, / from then the world rises, moon, sun and the elements…

From then until today, colonies of lost worlds / come from the grey valleys of chaos by unknown paths, / and in luminous swarms welling out of the infinite, / are drawn into life by a boundless longing.”

And no, it does not matter that these lines have not entered the so-called universal culture, for the True and the Beautiful are Universal even if they are not proclaimed in every language of the earth, or at every street corner, or even from the chairs of the great universities of the “small world” in which we live.

What matters is that the Truth was uttered — and that we and our language are the vehicle of the Beautiful.

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Theme: Between the Lines · Subtheme: On poems and verses