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Bound by Duty

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Stormy Smith

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“I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point.”

“This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.”

“Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened by that voice, infused with unexpected life: the western sky, streaked with bands of pale gold and purple; the two houses, standing gray and disconsolate against that sky; the clusters of trees casting deep black shadows here and there across the ground. The same voice that brought everything suddenly to life also drew them into another, much deeper world—a world that was normally hidden, a world that stretched out into eternity. Yusuke, who had at first looked on with a sense of distance as everyone else sat listening, their faces intent on the music, found himself being gradually drawn in as well, forgetting the moment and the place, lending his ear during that unworldly stretch of time as if entranced. No one spoke. The singing could not have lasted ten minutes, but when it ended he found the darkness all at once grew deeper.”

“But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . .”

“إن الناس لا يحبون بعضهم بعضا بما فيه الكفاية... وهم حينما يبدون الحب يخفون الحسد, وحينما يظهرون الشفقة يخفون الحقد .. و زوال الطبقات, والمساواة في الفرص .. وتيسير الغذاء والكساء والدواء, والضمان الإجتماعي في العجز والشيخوخة لم يحقق المساواة بعد ! فما زالت هناك فروق نولد بها .. وتحت إرهابنا نخفي نفوسا متباينة القوة والضعف .. متباينة الذكاء والغباء .. الخامل والعبقري .. الخبيث والطيب .. حتى بعد إن تشابهت الوجوه والملامح والتقاطيع .. من طول ما اختلطت وتزاوجت الاجناس المختلفة .. ما زلنا مختلفين !! وهو اختلاف في جوهر الخليقة .. ولا بد أن نقبله بالمحبة الكافية .. وبالروح الرياضية الضرورية بلا حقد وبلا حسد .. إذا كان لا بد لنا أن نبلغ التكامل الخلقي المطلوب ..”