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406 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
It’s our fate. If there weren’t wars, we’d massacre each other. So every sensible empire seeks a Chocim, to let out the evil blood of the masses and divert the accumulated discontent from itself. There’s no other profit, nor loss, be it from defeat or victory. For who ever remained sane after a victory? And who ever gained any experience out of defeat? Nobody. People are wicked children: wicked in action, children in mind. And it’ll never be any different.
What sort of a life, what sort of a world was this in which I did evil when I intended only the best!
And I did evil even when I did nothing, leaving both good and evil in peace. I did evil even in speaking, because I never said what I should have said. I did evil even when I was silent, for it meant that I was living as though I didn’t exist. I did evil because I was alive and didn’t know how to live.
I was present in life by chance, and nothing I did was mine.
Experience had taught me that what you can’t explain to yourself is better told to another. You can deceive yourself with just one part of the picture that happens to impose itself with a feeling difficult to express, since it hides in the face of the pain of comprehension and flies into the mists, into the intoxication that seeks no meaning. For the other, exact speech is essential, and this forces you to seek it, to feel its presence somewhere within you, and to grasp it, it or its shadow, so as to recognize it in another’s face, in another’s glance, as he begins to comprehend it. The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word. Or, still more important—if he desires to understand.
Jesi li prijatelj s tim čovjekom? Nisam, jedva se poznajemo.
Zašto se onda zauzima�� za njega? Zato što neće niko, zato što je sam i zato što je pošten.
Ljubav je ipak jača od svega.
But may God forgive you, your petty soul was none of your choosing, it was given to you. You were the last in the queue when there were no other, better ones left.