When it is a
question of death, the fashionable young suicide declares that his
self-destruction is the final proof of his own incontrovertible being.
And as for not-being in our public life, we have achieved it as much as
ever we want to, as much as is necessary. Whilst in private life there
is a swing back to paltry selfishness as a creed. And in the war there
is the position of neutralization and nothingness. It is a question of
knowing how _to be_, and how _not to be_, for we must fulfil both.
Enrico Persevalli was detestable with his '_Essere, o non essere_'. He
whispered it in a hoarse whisper as if it were some melodramatic murder
he was about to commit. As a matter of fact, he knows quite well, and
has known all his life, that his pagan Infinite, his transport of the
flesh and the supremacy of the male in fatherhood, is all
unsatisfactory. All his life he has really cringed before the northern
Infinite of the Not-Self, although he has continued in the Italian habit
of Self. But it is mere habit, sham.
How can he know anything about being and not-being when he is only a
maudlin compromise between them, and all he wants is to be a maudlin
compromise? He is neither one nor the other.
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