The last page of Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi
Strauss
Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the
individual is alone in the group, or any one society alone among other
societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever
into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain
open to us provided we are alive and the world is in existence a precarious arch
that points towards the inaccessible.
The road which it indicates to us is one that leads directly
away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it,
merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how
to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse
which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as
may be open in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his
achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison.
This is the grace for which every society longs,
irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization.
It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and
peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, this chance of for once
detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.
Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying!
And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity
can bear to interrupt its hive-like labors, let us grasp the essence of
what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath
society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful
than any work of Man; in the scent, more subtly evolved than our
books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the blink of an eye,
heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes,
through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.
(Contributed by Elizabeth Ames)
