Book: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and the Little Orphan
Quotes of Book: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,
Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it couldcome to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. Thedream embraced thousands of years and left in me only asense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of theirsin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of theplague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all thisearth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learntto lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm offalsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with ajest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with agerm, but that germ of falsity made its way into their heartsand pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten,sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy - cruelty . . . Oh, I don'tknow, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first bloodwas shed. They marvelled and were horrified, and began tobe split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it wasagainst one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed. They came to know shame, and shame brought them tovirtue. The conception of honour sprang up, and every unionbegan waving its flags. They began torturing animals, andthe animals withdrew from them into the forests and becamehostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, forisolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They beganto talk in different languages. They became acquainted withsorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and saidthat truth could only be attained through suffering. Thenscience appeared. As they became wicked they began talkingof brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood thoseideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice anddrew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and toensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardlyremembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe thatthey had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughedat the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it adream. They could not even imagine it in definite form andshape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lostall faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they solonged to be happy and innocent once more that theysuccumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, setup temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire;though at the same time they fully believed that it wasunattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed downto it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could havehappened that they had returned to the innocent and happycondition which they had lost, and if someone had shown itto them again and had asked them whether they wanted to goback to it, they would certainly have refused. They answeredme: "We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it andweep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punishourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who willjudge us and whose Name we know not. But we havescience, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and weshall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher thanfeeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Sciencewill give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and theknowledge of the laws of happiness is higher thanhappiness. book-quote
