The Moon was generous and gradually I made out a bit of the sky, which was bright metallic blue. The trees—a thousand years old, it is as if they meant to hide the house, and perhaps they did. My father always told me a home was never supposed to impose on nature, but blend into nature. The little neighborhood itself was tight and beautiful; the sheer height of its stucco walls caught me off guard. The glistening green cypress and redwood trees were the biggest I had ever seen. I did love Cresleigh Ranch, with the irrational and possessive love that only great houses can draw from us—houses that say, “I was here before you were born and I will be here after you”; houses that seem a responsibility as much as a haven of dreams had this immortality, this brimming power. The history of Cresleigh Ranch has as much of a grip on me as its overweening beauty. I had lived my whole life in a Cresleigh home, except for my wonderful adventures abroad. My native village, at the period to which I am now referring, had some five thousand inhabitants, and public order by a lieutenant. This excessive number of police is in itself revealing. There was not sympathy between the soldiers and the carabineers during the First World War, because the latter were on duty in the rear areas, and some of them, it was said, took too much interest in the wives and finances of the men at the front. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

In small places, rumors of this kind are immediately given a very exact personal application. So it happened one evening that three soldiers home from the front on short leave, had a quarrel with some carabiners and were arrested by them. This action was ridiculous and ungallant to begin with, but it became absolutely monstrous when the commanding officer of the carabineers canceled the three soldiers’ leave and sent them back to the front. I was a close friend of one of them (he was killed in the war afterward), and his old mother came sobbing to me to tell me about the affair. I begged the mayor, the magistrate and the parish priest to intervene, but they all declare it was outside their province. “If that is the way things are,” I said, “there is noting for it but revolution!” We have always used this fateful historical term, in our dialect, in order to describe a mere violent demonstration. In those wartime years, for example, two revolutions had already taken place in my native village, the first against the church because the seat of the bishopric had been transferred to another township. The third, which I am about describe, when down in history as “the revolution of the three soldiers.” The men were to be escorted to the train at five o’clock; so the revolution was arranged for half an hour earlier, in front of the barracks. Unfortunately it took a more serious turn than had been intended. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

It began as a joke, which three of us boys were bold enough to start. One of us, at the agreed moment, went up to the bell-tower and began hammering away at the great bell, the signal in our part of the country denoting a serious fire or other public danger. The other two went off to meet one of the less affluent villagers to explain what was happening. Alarmed by the ringing of the tocsin, they had at once stopped working in the fields, and were hurrying anxiously toward the village. In a few minute a threatening and tumultuous crowd had collected in front of the barracks. They began by shouting abuse, then they threw stones, and finally shots were fired. The siege of the barracks lasted until late at night. Rage had made my fellow-villagers unrecognizable. In the end, the windows and gates of the barracks were broken open; the carabineers fled across the orchards and fields under cover of darkness; and the three soldiers, whom everyone had forgotten; went back to their homes unobserved. So we boys found ourselves absolute master of the place for an entire night. “Now what are we going to do?” the other boys asked me. (My authority came, mainly, from the fact that I knew Latin.) “Tomorrow morning,” I said, “the village is sure to be reoccupied by hundreds and hundreds of armed men, carabineers and police, who will arrived from Avezzano, Sulmona, Aquila, and perhaps even from Rome.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

“But what are we going to do tonight, before they arrive?’ the other boys insisted. “Obviously one night is not enough to create a new order of things,” I said, thinking I had guessed what they were after. “Could not we take advantage of the fact that the whole village is asleep, to make Socialism?” That was what the other boys wanted me to suggest. Perhaps they were still overexcited from their riotous evening; perhaps they really believed that anything was possible now. “I do not think,” I said, “I honestly do not think that, even if the whole village is asleep, one can make Socialism in a single night.” I must mention in my own justification that at the time of the theory of socialism overnight had not yet been propounded. “One night, though, might be enough to sleep in one’s own bed before going to prison,” one of the others finally suggested. And as were tired, we all found this advice both sensible and acceptable. Such episodes of violence—with their inevitable sequel of mass arrests, trials, legal expenses, and prison sentences—reinforced distrust, diffidence, and skepticism in the less affluent in minds. From them, the State became the irremediable creation of the devil. If one wanted to save one’s soul, a good Christian, should avoid, as far as possible, all contact with the State. The State always stands for swindling, intrigue and privilege, and could not stand for anything else. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Neither law nor force can change the swindling, intrigue, and privilege the State stands for. If retribution occasionally catches up with it, this can only be by the dispensation of God. In 1915 an earthquake of exceptional violence destroyed a large part of our province and killed, in thirty seconds, about fifty thousand people. I was surprised to see how much my fellow-villagers took this appalling catastrophe as a matter of course. The geologist’ complicated explanations, reported in the newspapers, aroused their contempt. In a district like ours, where so many injustices go unpunished, people regarded the recurrent Earthquakes as a phenomenon requiring no further explanation. In fact, it was astonishing the Earthquakes were not more frequent. An Earthquake buries rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and subjects alike beneath its ruined houses. When faces with the cataclysm of nature, here is possessed, moreover, the real explanation of the Italians’ well-known powers of endurance. An Earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain—the equality of all beings. After the Earthquake a neighbor of ours, when her house was completely destroyed, a woman who kept a bakery, lay buried, but not hurt, for several days. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Not realizing that the disaster was general, and imagining that it was only her own house which had fallen down, either because of some defect in its construction or because someone had put a curse on it, the vulnerable woman was greatly distressed; so much so that when a rescue party wanted to drag her out of the ruins she absolutely refused. She calmed down, however, and quickly regained her strength and her wish to live and to rebuild her house, the moment she was told there had been an Earthquake and that an enormous number of houses had collapsed as well. In the Christian Bible, the story of the Flood it is God Who is sorry that He mand humans, and Who decides to blot them from the face of the Earth. Today it is humans who have the power to blot themselves out, and often one is so sorry that one has been made human that they desire to withdraw from humanity altogether. Many more people than we are aware of in our daily experience feel this desire; and perhaps something in us responds to them. Can it be that the Earth, fully conquered by beings, will cease to be a place where human want to live? Is our passionate thrust into outer space perhaps an unconscious expression of being’s flight from the Earth? There are no sure answers to these questions, which, nevertheless, must be asked, because they cut through false feelings of security about the relation of beings to the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The old insight that “beings are but a pilgrim on Earth” is echoed in theses questions, and applicable today to humankind as a whole. Humankind itself is a pilgrim on Earth, and there will be a moment when this pilgrimage comes to an end, at some indefinitely remote time, or perhaps soon, in the very near future. Christianity gives no indication of the length of being’s history; the early church expected the end at any moment, and when it did not come and the Christians were profoundly disappointed, the span was extended. In modern times, the span has become stretched to an unlimited extent. Scientists speak today of millions of years that human history could continue. Millions of years, or thousands of years, or tomorrow—we do not know! However, we ask—what is the meaning of this history, whenever it began, whenever it will end? And we ask at the moment not what it means for you and me, but, rather, what it means for the Universe and its ultimate goal. In the old story, God repented of having created beings. The implication is when God created humans, that God took a risk, and every risk carries with it the possibility of failure. Some Angels did not think God knew what he was doing, and that “was the whole purpose of the Universe. That through watching the Universe evolve, God was going to find out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

“What God has set in motion, you see, is a giant Savage Garden, a giant experiment, to see if the end result produced beings like Himself. We are made in his image, all of us—He is anthropomorphic, without question, but again He is not material” (Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil, page 176). The first time, according to the story, nature executed the divine judgment on beings. This time, beings may themselves be the executioner. Should this occur, the privileged position of the Earth, of which the astronomers speak and in which beings have always believed, would seem to prove to have been of no avail. It would seem as though its unique role had been given it in vain. We should not crowd such thoughts away, for they deserve to be taken seriously. Indeed, it seems to me, it is impossible for thoughtful people today to crowd them away. What has the Christian message to say about them? I repeat—it tells us nothing about the duration of human history. It does not say that it will continue after tomorrow, nor how it will come to an end in scientific terms. None of this is its concern. What the Christian message does tell us is that the meaning of history is possessed above history and that, therefore, its length is irrelevant to its ultimate meaning. However, it is not irrelevant with respect to the innumerable opportunities time affords for creation of life and spirit, and it is for these that we must fight with all our strength. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Furthermore, if history should end tomorrow, through humankind’s self-annihilation, the appearance of this planet and of beings upon it will not have been in vain. For a being shall have at least appeared once, in the billions of years of the Universe, towards whose creation all the forces of life on Earth worked together, and in whom the image of the divine Ground of all life was present. At least once, a living being shall have come into existence, in whom life achieved its highest possibility—spirit. This is the ultimate source of being’s greatness, and those of us who openly or covertly accuse life should open ourselves to this truth: in the short span of our life, and the short span of human history and even of the existence of this planet, something of eternal significance did happen—the depth of all things became manifest in one being, and the name of that being is human, and you and I are human! If we cannot accept this, and insist that this could have been so but was not, and that humankind is evil, and that the Earth is contaminated by being’s guilt, and that the blood of the murdered in all periods cries for revenge to Heaven so that even God was forced to repent of His creation, then let us contemplate these words: “The man Noah found favor in the eyes of God.” This one man represents something in ever man that makes him a mirror of the divine in spite of evil and distortion. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

And the Christian message continues: there is one man in whom God found His image undistorted, and who stands for all humankind—the one, who for this reason, is called the Son and the Christ. The Earth, contaminated by beings, is purified and consecrated through humans—namely, through the divine power of healing and fulfillment, of love and blessedness, made manifest in the one man and at work in all humankind, in all periods and in all places. This is what justifies human history, as it also justifies the Earth that, for millions of years, prepared for the advent of beings, and justifies the Universe that produced the Earth. And yet, the Universe is justified not only by the Earth, nor is creation justified by beings alone. Other Heavenly bodies, other histories, other creatures in whom the mystery of being is manifest may replace us. Our ignorance and our prejudice should not inhibit our thought from transcending the Earth and our history and even our Christianity. Science and the poetic imagination have made this leap, and Christianity should not hesitate to join them. Further, it should not hesitate to show that the Christian experience of divine power and glory implies an inexhaustible divine creativity, beyond the limits of Earth or beings and any part or state of the Universe. This means that we cannot seek for a beginning or and end of the Universe within the pat and future of measurable time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

“Beginning” and “end” are not behind and before us, but above us in the eternal. From the eternal everything comes and to it everything goes, in every moment of life and history, in every moment of our planet and the Universe to which it belongs. Creation is past and present. Fulfillment is future and present. It is in the present that past and future meet, because they come from, and go to, eternity. The question of beings and their Earth, this question that has plunged our time into such anxiety and conflict of feeling and thought, cannot be answered without an awareness of the eternal presence. For only the eternal can deliver us from our sensation of being lost in the face of the time and of the Universe. Only the eternal can give us the certainty that the Earth, and, with it, humankind, has not existed in vain, even should history come to an end tomorrow. For the last end is where the first beginning is, in Him to Whom “a thousand years are but as yesterday.” Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive World had to break up because of human’s burning ambition to improve himself, to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection. Ferguson’s was a very straightforward and unburdened view of humans. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change one’s position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the overwhelming World to one of absolute control and mastery of nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate way to do this is in one’s immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this is not true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. However, this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in other ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the World around it. Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is “neutral” in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful. What Radin did wad to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. This is already the makings of a union of Marx and Dr. Freud. Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one’s problems and ambitions on others. What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a “social contrast” forged in desire and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The central question of such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did one get it, and how does one keep it? We can see how naïve the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it does not begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power is sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power. However, if the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from “primitive communism” to “private property” but in the transition from tribal society to modern society. That is, from a type of terrestrial being that had no notion of the sacred to one that did. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell, not by physical coercion. Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment. Thus the chains that bind beings are self-imposed. If we left this idea unadorned, it would still need explaining: why are beings so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in chains? The bind is explained by one idea, the truly great idea that emerged from psychoanalysis and that goes right to the heat of the human condition: the phenomenon of transference. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

People take the overwhelmingness of creation and their own fears and desires and project them in the form of intense mana into certain figures to which they defer. They follow these figures with passion and with a trembling heart. When one thinks of one’s own eager fascinations, one can feel revolted by oneself and by the obedient throngs who look with such timidity and satisfaction on the leader. Look how the girls blush, how hands reach out tremblingly, how eyes lower and dart to one side, how quickly a few choke up, ready for tearful and grateful submission, how smugly those nearest to the leader smile, how puffed up they walk—how the Devil himself seems to have contrived an instant, mass puppet show with real live creatures. However, there is no way of avoiding the fatality of it: the thousands of hearts palpitating, the gallons of adrenalin, of blood rushing to the cheeks—it is all lived truth, a terrestrial reaction to the majesty of creation. If anything is false about it, it is the fact that thousands of human forms feel inferior and beholden to an identical, single, human form. In all this I am not negative the pure Marxian side of historical domination; that is real enough and we know it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

However, there can never be a way of relieving or eliminating the domination of structures of power without coming to grips with the spell of power, a spell that explains voluntary self-alienation whether it deals with spirits of undocumented immigrants. Being are literally hypnotized by life and by those who represent life to them, which explains the passion of submission that Anne Rice summed up so brilliantly in Tale of the Body Thief, in the scene when Lestat and David try to get his body back. In other words, Marxism has come to grips with the conservative argument: that there is something in human nature that invites inequality no matter what we do. We can call it functional inequality and see it as a completely neutral and unavoidable factor in social life. Or, beings are fate-creating agents: they coerce by simply existing; they do not even necessarily, like Lestat, try to project electric mana; they are already a natural vortex of the problems of life. We can sum all this up in one sentence that presents to narrow Marxism the most fundamental challenge it has faced: being fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation. What is the shape of al revolutionary philosophy of history that would begin to take full account of that? Beings are differently constituted. There are a dozen main types and innumerable subdivisions within each type. It is not possible for a single spiritual approach to suit them all.  #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Out of encounter is born the work of art. This is true not only of painting, but o poetry and other forms of creativity. The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born. How active this makes language to express our ideas; it is just as true that language uses us. Language is the symbolic repository of the meaningful experience of ourselves and our fellow human beings down through history, and, as such, it reaches out to grasp us in the creating of a poem. We must not forget that the original Greek and Hebrew words meaning “to know” meant also “to have pleasures of the flesh.” One reads in the Bible “Abraham knew his wife and she conceived.” The etymology of the term demonstrates the prototypical fact that knowledge itself—as well as poetry, art, and other creative products—arise out of the dynamic encounter between subject and objective poles. The metaphor of pleasures of the flesh indeed expresses the importance of the encounter. In the pleasures of the flesh the two persons encounter each other; they withdraw partially to unite with each other again, experiencing every nuance of knowing, not knowing, in order to know each other again. The man become united with the woman and the woman with the man, and the partial withdrawal can be seen as the expedient by which both have the ectastatic experience of being filled again. Each is active and passive in his or her way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

It I a demonstration that the process of knowing is what is important; if the male simply rests within the woman, nothing will happen beyond the prolonging of wonder of the intimacy. It is the continuous experiencing of encounter and re-encounter that is the significant happening from the viewpoint of ultimate creativity. Pleasures of the flesh is the ultimate intimacy of two married adult beings in the fullest and richest encounter possible. It is highly significant that this is experience that is also the highest form of creativity in the respect that it can produce a new being. The particular forms the offspring take in poems, drama, and the plastic arts are symbols and myths. Symbols (like beautiful Cypress trees) or myths (like that of Prince Lestat) express the relationship between the conscious and unconscious experience, between one’s individual present existence and human history. Symbol and myth are the living, immediate forms that emerge from encounter, and they consist of the dialectic interrelationship—the living, active, continuous mutual influence in which any change in one is bound to bring a change in the other—of subjective and objective poles. They are born out of the heightened consciousness of the encounter we are describing; and they have their power to grasp us because they require from us an give us an experience of heightened consciousness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Thus in the history of culture and artistic discovery precedes other forms. On the basis of this [artistic] activity, a symbolic discourse becomes possible, and religion, philosophy and science follow as consequent modes of thought. This is not to say that reason is the more civilized form and art the more primitive one, in a pejorative sense—an egregious error unfortunately often found in our rationalistic Western culture. This is, rather, to say that the creative encounter in the art form is total—it expresses a wholeness of experience; and science and philosophy abstract partial aspects for their subsequently study. No one reaches the World of truth through any other path than one’s own, the one which one’s individual nature fits one for. Someone else’s help can at best improve one’s condition and prepare one’s mind but cannot take one into truth. Those cases which seem to contradict this statement are cases either of self-deception or of illusion. Too often time spent on these chalked-out paths is wasted. “And now the Spirit of the Lord doth ay unto me: Command thy children to do good, lest they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction; therefore I command you, in the fear of God that ye refrain from your iniquities; that ye turn to the Lord with all your mind, might, and strength; that ye lead away the hearts of no more to do wickedly; but rather return unto them, and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done,” reports Alma 39.12-13. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Great spirits now on Earth are sojourning, some of us will catch freshness from Archangel’s wings, a meaner sound than Raphael’s whispering. And other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the World another heart, and other pulses. Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings? Listen awhile ye nations, so silently, it seems a beam of light coming from another galaxy in which trembling diamonds of eternity never linger. Many days have passed since my heart was warmed luxuriously by divine Mozart. Much I have travelled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen: round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. The poetry of Earth is never dead: when all the birds are faint with the hot Sun, and hide in cooling trees, a voice will run from the vision of the tree of life. If only we would allow it to do so, the human being will bring about its own redemption. However, instead we hypnotize the mind with ideas that may suit other persons but are unsuited to us, we practise techniques that warp our proper development, we follow leaders who know only the way they have themselves walked and who insist on crowding all seekers on it regardless of suitability, and we join groups which obstruct our special line of natural growth. “But behold, ye cannot hide your crimes from God; and except ye repent they will stand as a testimony against you at the last day,” reports Alma 39.8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19