The Answer
Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness.
These dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful.
A severed hand Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history… for contemplation or in fact… Often appears atrociously ugly.
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
Robinson Jeffers
Другие работы автора
Carmel Point
The extraordinary patience of things This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses-How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses...
Contrast
The world has many seas, Mediterranean, Atlantic, but here is the shore of the one ocean And here the heavy future hangs like a cloud; the enormous scene; the enormous games
The Purse-Seine
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off New...
Fawns Foster-Mother
The old woman sits on a bench before the door and With her meagre pale demoralized daughter Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the And saying that when she was first