An Anthology of Czechoslovak Literature/The Present Age

LIFE has not weakened upon the earth, as is supposed by the over-wearied amongst us. All greatness of past and future is hidden in the present age, and is ever prepared to flash forth in beauty. In the fire of ​our every instant are encountered the same powers which enkindled the myriad suns of the milky way, which with billows of radiance rolled the seed of life from star to star, and our oceans throb with the same quivering of motherhood as when they felt in their depths the first pregnant stir of new beings. Lightly as a dulcet wind there drifts through all creation the same breath which shook the lost tertiary herbage, aroused unnumbered kindred of animals and sent them forth as the spirit’s vanguard from hot forests of an ancient spring-tide. Uninterruptedly toil the same powers, by which languages were fashioned, nations were mustered, and while we dream, earth changes through endeavour of myriads. The air which we breathe has the same secret structure as the mountain breeze amid which was braced the giant breast of heroes, prophets and lovers. Equally astounding to-day as ages ago is the art possessed by waters and suns in shaping of earths, equally alert the life of crystals and metals, equally harmonious the rhythm pulsing amid workshops of matter, which know not sabbaths and repose. String after string bursts upon the secret implement with which life plays its song of bliss and torment of countless beings, but the remaining strings assume the whole bequest of those rended, the whole compass of their intervals, and ever bolder and severer, more perilous and intricate is the playing, an ever greater skill is needed to maintain the original lofty poise of vital ardour, ever more spiritual and baffling are the variations on one and the same theme, developing through the ages. But although the aim of life is perpetually being fulfilled and at every instant attained in hidden depths, all that lives, even the weakest, weariest, most misshapen of creatures in their contest with death ​and their victory over it have moments of rapt and glowing beauty,—yet only spirit-forces, toiling upon earth, appear to-day freer, their manifestations prepared through ages, by which the body has been transformed, richer and more marvellous, the need for love and happiness more delicate and overwhelming, like a whirlpool clutching myriads of mortals in ever widening eddies. From every past age have arisen several of the great masters among our kindred and joined the ranks of intellects on guard, watching over our labour, and although they have evolved for the loftier sphere of a spirit-universe, they do not abandon earth, which they loved over-much, always ready to return in lustrous embodiment to solitudes even of this poorest among lovers, and in a sufficiently deep stillness, prepared by the heart’s fervour, to speak to it in language more eloquent and sweet than they were wont to speak in to their disciples amid groves of bygone cities, beneath stars that shone in nights ages ago.

Radiance of unbounded day, strangely magnificent, immoderately intense, increases at every instant above the spirit-earth.

Unbelievable have become all things. Every stone, every blade of grass, insects for whom a moment suffices to achieve their flight to death, the tree in blossom, which age-long breathed in sweet self-abandonment of its mute happiness, everything with unfamiliar strength bestows balm upon keenly receptive senses. Our souls appear bewildered and stunned by half-evolved truths which like fragrances, perilous with excess of heaviness, have suddenly trickled from myriads of invisible blossoms, as if in another world had arisen a season of marvellous springtide recurring once in long ages. From the night-​time of our surmising ascend worlds, and their splendour slays imagery and suns, as reflectors of spirit-flotillas they seem to draw near to us from dark oceans of the universe. There ensues a dizziness of the feelings from manifested greatness of the last generations; new concepts of man, matter, cosmos. Sorrow of seekers and secret distrust of what is discovered―a distrust hidden until death;—graves into the countenances of numberless mortals of this age secret signs by which all are revealed as in a deep spirit-kindred. Truths are allied like sorrows a rank of spirits suffers equal creative torment in isolated regions of pondering and, knowing not of their nearness, dread one the other in jealousy, when they suddenly meet, with blissful dread and unfaith of lovers who have beheld themselves in unforeseen solitudes.

And the final discovery, to which man begins to draw near upon earth, the body. . . . The body in its pangs, sicknesses and in its ripening, valuer and judge of things, creator and mocking plunderer of illusions, the body,—a spirit seeing farther than our reason, the body,—shaper of dreams, which, a feverish weaver, it weaves from all fibres, from moonlit twilights, from mists and gloom, and which it stretches and furls as a mariner his sails according to peril or favour of cosmic winds. The perplexing body, turned to this earth’s sun, and on the yonder side spiritual, blossoming beneath unvisible suns of another universe. Are not its thriving and decay, the beginning of its sickness and the return of strength, soundness and goodness revealed from hidden resolutions of thought? From choice of metaphors, from establishing of proofs, from selecting of wisdom, from justice of the will? What betokens rhythm and intonation of the voice, which evokes beings dead long before us and ​reveals distant kinships? And contours of smiles, speech of hands, grim exactitude of gestures, which as lightning-flashes blaze into the night-time of our hidden annals? To find a brotherly word, irrefutable, potent and delicate, into whose ardour is wafted the chill breath of highest intellects, is that not a curing stream for the body, a magical medicine which begins its healing from the invisible? And seek not all our prophets this word? And does it not already resound hidden amid the soul’s depths? What an apparition, at which the breath is bated, to behold a countenance harmonised by the gentle life of higher mortals, a smile purchased with victorious days and victorious nights, and a glance from which a dazzling inner universe blazes with unwavering certainty from places where death is not. No epoch was without these instinctive fulfillers of a statute, who were teachers by the mere fact of having existed, by the unbounded haleness of their being, by the involuntary greatness of their every action, even the simplest, and in whose nearness all things showed themselves to be good, happiness attainable, destiny kind, as if their every gesture evoked and controlled a spirit-music inaudible to the hearing, perceptible to an enraptured heart.

The word life acquires new significance on the lips of mortals. Perhaps more than any other word, secret, ample, immeasurable, it to-day embraces a statute which visionaries, prophets and seers have yearned to utter in myths, symbols and silences. A statute, unreachable in its dazzling magnificence, speaking to each being with different tokens, but a statute altogether definite, disobedience and the nameless heresy to which are punished by a fermenting, by tragical hallucinations ​and forfeiture of love. It is murmured from winds, chanted by waters, summoned by forests across the whole horizon. In silent devotion it is complied with by flower and animal; families of daring and ruthless insects, mustered like armies, victorious birds and heroic beasts of prey, the worm severed by the husbandman’s spade, the tree-trunk wedged in by anxious roots amid a rocky cleft, phosphorescent greenery of underground caverns, beings, which in spite of all suffering, gamesters undaunted by all losses, anew and anew cling to life as if performing the rites of some eternal belief, severe and fierce, which has imposed a tax even upon oblivion, dalliance, sunny ecstasy, delight of slumber, and which has endowed bliss with the thirst for eternity, that the onslaught may be the more violent, pain and death the more terrifying, but the more magnificent the gesture, creator of beauty.

It is a statute, obedience to which renders thought and deed clairvoyant, upraises the spirit like a whirlwind, and all beings, which through overmuch strength would be perilous to their kindred, it makes magnanimous and kindly, thought too deeply penetrating and perilous to life it severs by sudden tenderness, and before glances too clear in their range and undeceived by the universal illusion, it lowers a rain of tears like a veil, moderating the fierce relentlessness of vision.

It is an optical delusion of the spirit that precisely the magnificence of present time eludes us. Never was the hallucination of immensity, the kingly zest of the spirit for embracing all things, mightier than in the marvellous days in which we live. Where are dreamings of bygone man, who created a right to his own enclosed garden, to his happiness anxiously guarded even to ​beyond the grave, and who established rampart, dense forest, waters, multitude of slaves, terror and death as a guard, in order to bestow safely upon his kindred? The man, whose nearness we surmise in the trembling of our hearts, in a sudden, unfamiliar ring in our voices, in kisses of a beloved woman, in unrest of our ponderings, that it seems to us as if all clouds upon our horizon were pillars of dust, rising along his march, the powerful and brotherly man of to-morrow is already to-day overthrowing in our dreams the frontiers of realms, and he is taking earth as his boundless garden, hedged in by the heavens; his are continents and islands, flung like baskets of flowers upon waves of the oceans. Nations toiling upon both hemispheres take turns at his labour like pitmen on day and night shifts, descending to a single gallery. In the dreams of his creative architects, whole cities arise, in a single creative gesture, in a single victorious casting of shapes, a gigantic crystallisation in accordance with a single statute of number, bloom of matter in accordance with a single statute of growth. Cities with their gardens and chimneys, glowing gloomwards, where toil the demons of mastered forces, obedient to the spirit, and where in twilights of solemn evening hours magical moons are aglow above streets through which multitudes press onwards. The silent revolt of those suffering among all nations, and the still more perilous revolt of loftiest spirits in radiant solitudes of understanding, in calm of computation, in sparkling of intentness upon all things of the earth, this bestows the intensity of great historic resolutions upon the present hours. We feel that the day of judgement is not in the future, but is uninterruptedly present in the universe. That each hour judges over all hours, each of us against his will is the executor ​of justice in lives of mortals, the woman in the life of man, the man in the destiny of woman, and in the destiny of both the child which, a mysterious guest has come and sat down at their table, even the one which shunned their house. . . . New love, loftier and more overwhelming than elemental passion, which was a black earth for its magical blossom, glitters in our tears and in our ecstatic smiles. The heart of throngs-secret index of the hour in eternity—begins to feel horror which it never felt yet: horror of brother-slaying; it begins to feel a yearning for peace, the kingly right to a dream of happiness, of liberty and mastery of earth. Brotherly assemblies of myriads amid nations of all tongues, and ever more vehement contest of spirits and a more fervid hunger after power and bliss, all that places man beside man, strength against strength, all seems as if it were directed by a gigantic spiritual unity, awaking from a myriad of years of enchantment and toiling serenely upon all sides at once, both in the light of day and the stillness of night, in passionate darkness of hearts, in cravings for motherhood, for knowledge, for the unattainable; rejecting naught, secure in its omnipotence, and to it even what we call chance is as a stone in the hands of the builders. In spite of all weariness of disbelief, despair of lovers, in spite of guilt whose unatoned silence burdens whole generations, man is growing towards a spiritual unity thoughout the whole earth. Nothing can hinder this power which like a cataract is rushing forth with unsurmised rapidity, a current which embraces nations isolated for ages, it shatters bonds and fashions new ones more spiritual, for new thoughts it shapes new bodies, upon myriads of beings it spreads hope and sorrow. What are elemental ​calamity, cosmic change, cooling of suns and earths to the spirit? The impossible, incredible, insane, appears within its precincts joyously easy, alluringly natural, subtly wise, beyond all consideration. The more perilous the immediate instant, the nearer decay and death seem, all the speedier and more feverish is the stir of thoughts and hearts, the more enticing the art of pleasure, the more bounteous the help from secret hoards of an invisible world; the frailer the implement of life and the more precious its preservation, all the more delicate is the feeling for sorrow, that instructress in the law, that protectress of beauty. If it is needful, life, ever victorious, wise in experiences of all worlds which have prepared this world, summons diseases tending to higher health, creating a cult of purity, reason, coldness of feeling, when lust and poison are threatening the race, and death is in its pleasances like a gardener who transplants the seedlings each on to its plot, from visible to invisible.

Life has not weakened upon the earth. More vehement than ever before seems the thundering of secretly yoked suns and worlds soaring through ages. More magically, more mightily, more blissfully self-certain is the gaze of women, and reverence for the child, the inheritor and preparer of a new earth, is increasing.