"Nothing can match the treasure of common memories,
of trials endured together,
of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.
It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning,
to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak."
Chapter 1: The Craft
Antoine de Saint Exupery begins the memoir of his time as a pilot by taking the reader into the world of the student pilot taking classes on meteorology in tired old hangars and seeing the pilots returning from harrowing flights across France and Central Europe as death-defying heroes. He and his fellow students would become delivery pilots for Aeropostale flying between Toulouse in southwestern France and Dakar in French West Africa. It is a dangerous flight through clouds below which, according to one of his instructors, lies eternity. Antoine and his fellow students learn that just below the clouds through which they will navigate are mountain ranges and all manner of obstacles on the ground unmarked on any map.
It is in this state of coming to recognize the enormity.....
Chapter 2: The Men
Chapter two describes the mettle of the men who fly for Aeropostale, typified by two men in particular. The first is Mermoz who was charged with the task of charting a traversable route through the Andes from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile. He is proven for this type of task in that he is the man who did the same project in the Casablance-Dakar route. A pioneer of flying uncharted areas, Mermoz is the pilot who teaches Antoine and his fellow pilots how to land on unlit airstrips and in the ocean.
In the beginning of this particular expedition, Mermoz and his mechanic find themselves trapped on top of a mesa with sheer cliffs and a plane that won't start. His solution to the problem is simply to.....
Chapter 3: The Tool
Chapter three opens with a description of the remarkable thing it is that the key to really excellent and functional design is not to add as much as possible, but to take away as much as possible, until ultimately what is left is very like the lines of the naked human body. That simplicity is what makes a thing as aerodynamic as possible and what takes hours and drafts by the greatest engineers before it is perfected. In a particularly elegant analogy, Antoine says it is like the artist's visioning the finished sculpture from a block of marble; it is not crafting that he is doing as much as releasing the already perfect image from its stony prison. Engineers just have to discover the lines that are already there.....
Chapter 4: The Elements
In the opening of "The Elements," Antoine is preparing to describe a typhoon but bracing the reader for what he is sure will be a disappointing recounting of the tale. Pointing to Joseph Conrad, he points out that he made no attempt at describing the storm itself, only the effect in had on the people and objects contained in the ship being tossed in the storm. And so, with the point established that he expects to sound like an exaggerating little boy remembering things with more terror than he experienced them with at the time, he begins.
He is preparing to fly through a particularly turbulent area of the Andes where high and low pressure regions converge and bounce around over the mountains, giving pilots a workout in controlling their.....
Chapter 5: The Plane and the Planet
Antoine opens this chapter by pointing out that planes' allowing humans a birds-eye-view of their planet has allowed for a certain removal of innocence and the possibility of romanticizing their home orb. Where roads are able to run along the most choice of landscapes, highlighting and touring the traveler through the plush and civilized, planes pull away the curtain on the barren and desolate as well as the remote and beautiful.
The first of three sections in this chapter opens with his description of the lava planes south of the Gallegos River on the way to the Straits of Magellan. Quiet following their centuries of eruptions, they are barren and mute, covered with black glaciers. Then south of those, older glaciers of volcanic rock that have begun.....
Chapter 6: Oasis
Antoine's chapter on the oases that served him opens with the story of a family in Paraguay who took him in for a night. They lived in a house that was once beautiful and regal and has since become charming in its age, broken-down, and very clean. The couple had two daughters. The daughters disappeared and reappeared at random moments due to the age and secret passageways in the house. He was certain the daughters spent their time away feeding and otherwise tending to their array of animals. He notes being charmed by the place and the family but was in fear of being judged too harshly by the little girls. He sits at the table in this fear until the girls announce that.....
Chapter 7: Men of the Desert
The seventh chapter begins with an admission that men might be tempted to believe they are wasting their lives in the mineral world of the desert while the living, breathing world outside it is growing more beautiful and then passing its prime. He contends, however, that he and his fellow pilots looked on the desert as the place in which they lived the best years of their lives. He determines to tell the stories of a few of the desert places closest to his heart.
The first of five sections opens with Antoine's recounting of his first day in the Sahara Desert. He was piloting a plane carrying the mail that lost a connecting rod. Guillaumet was piloting the convoy plane, but to board a plane together would.....
Chapter 8: Prisoner of the Sand
In the eighth chapter, Antoine tells the story of his trip from Paris to Saigon. Before he left, he and the meteorologist look at the weather over the Middle East which he would be crossing, and spot something Antoine thinks is a sandstorm. He and his mechanic, Prevot, begin their journey with Antoine feeling strong and ready for a beautiful and uneventful flight. Flying through thick clouds, however, and unable to get above or below them, the two eventually crash land, unaware of their proximity to the ground, in the middle of a desert.
Not knowing whether they have crossed the Nile or not and with no reason to hope that any rescue party will be coming for them, the two make a plan to set out.....
Chapter 9: Barcelona and Madrid
The chapter devoted to Barcelona and Madrid marks his turn toward the politics of men and for what things they are willing to die and kill. Flying over a town he remembers as quiet and peaceful, having spent time there during a previous assignment, he daydreams about sitting in the café, listening to musicians. Flying further into Spain, he flies over a town he knows to be scarred by the civil war happening there and is struck by how, from above, there is nothing detectable about the war. once he and his companion are on the ground, they start to see smoking churches and observe as they move from town to town how strangely this war is working itself out.
Divided between Communism, Fascism, Anarchism and Socialism, each town.....
Chapter 10: Conclusion
Returning to the image of the bureaucrats on the bus the day of his first mail flight, Antoine closes by drawing a comparison with the peasants he sees on a train. The people were all sleeping and all worn and dirtied by lives of labor. People who once fell in love and dreamed romantic and lofty dreams had been hammered with the same stamp of labor and tossed about by the economic winds until every dream of a quiet and peaceful pastoral life was washed from them. Their national identities and the items that distinguished their homes, even their physical forms, had been sacrificed to the necessity to labor and to.....
"Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. one by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together."
"I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."
"Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself."
"And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery."
"The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens. "
"He is among those beings of great scope who spread their leafy branches willingly over broad horizons. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world."
"a last glimmer of intelligence (p. 79)"
"You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell forever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into my mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be, and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind. You came towards me in an aureole of charity and magnanimity bearing the gift of water. All my friends and all my enemies marched towards me in your person. It did not seem to me that you were rescuing me: rather did it seem that you were forgiving me. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world."
"What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered."
"It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys."
"When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver."
on peut enivrer les Allemands de l'ivresse d'être Allemands et compatriotes de Beethoven. on peut en saouler jusqu'au soutier. C'est, certes, plus facile que de tirer du soutier un Beethoven."
"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures—in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.... "
''Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded.''
''Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.''
''The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.''
To be a man is ... to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's s...
''The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.''
''only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.''
''Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.''
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), French aviator, author. Wind, Sand, and Stars, ch. 8 (1939).
In this book we follow the author of The Little Prince in his flying adventures for Aéropostale, the French airmail carrier that evolved into Air France. In those days airplane engines were undependable, and every flight was an adventure. on some flights two planes were sent out together in case one engine threw a rod. The planes were so primitive that the pilots kept their compass and altimeter with them when they left their plane. The few lights on the dashboard of the open cockpit were usually covered during night flying so that the pilots could steer by the luminous star field overhead.
This is a story of flying, but also a story of soaring. The flying of man-made, heavier-than-air machines and the soaring of the human spirit. This book marks a turning point for Saint Exupéry between his flying-machine stories in his 1931 Night Flight and his soaring human spirit stories in his 1948 Citadelle, published in English as The Wisdom of the Sands.
In the following passage Saint-Exupéry shows his insight into paradigmatic change — how new paradigms must be expressed in the language of the old. [See ARJ: Language Structure and Change]
[page 70] To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.
Every step on the road of progress takes us farther from habits which, as the life of man goes, we had only recently begun to acquire. We are in truth emigrants who have not founded our homeland.
Emigrants in search of our homeland — an apt metaphor for our ensouled human condition. Flying itself is a metaphor for the human spirit encased in a mineral-based mechanism. Like the pilot, our spirit seems at times only able to fly so high as our material bodies can carry us, up until now. But again and again Saint-Exupéry directs our eyes to the stars — we are souls carried on the wind in bodies of sand and we look up longingly to the stars, our homeland.
Sometimes Saint-Exupéry flew without his flying machine, as in this passage, when, lying on his back in the Saharan night, he felt himself falling upward. This passage reminds me of lying on the beach and looking upward. If there is no tree to break my view of the sky, no umbrella, no cabana roof, I would experience the vertigo he describes. I would feel exactly as though I were falling upward.
[page 105, 106] When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
In June of 1999 when this happened to me on the beach of Gulf Shores I realized that this was a condition that had been with me since I was a child. I controlled this irrational feeling of "falling into the sky" either by closing my eyes, sitting up, or turning my head to the side. on this bright sunny day, I suddenly recognized that this vertigo was a doyle, a physical body state stored before I was five years old. It was stored as proprioceptive sensations of falling upward. I had no idea where it came from, but I had a tool available to identify the doyle and convert it into an innocuous conceptual memory. It was a tool based on concepts that I first learned from Doyle Henderson and one that I had been honing and polishing. I called it a speed trace — a method that would allow me to ride that irrational, fearful falling-up feeling back into time, to a time before the original event occurred, that event during which the proprioceptive sensations of falling-up were stored in my brain mechanisms.
As I started the trace, I realized that I had to move my head to the side because the fear was so great, and I sped backward through the years as quickly as I could say them, 59, 49, 39, 29, 19, 9, 5, 4, 3, . . . and blessed relief! , 2. Sometime between three and two, the falling-up feeling abated - I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I relaxed, turned my head to face the open sky, and tentatively opened my eyes. The falling-up feeling was gone! I asked myself, "What's a plausible thing that could have happened to me at two years old that could have been stored as a falling-up doyle?" I immediately thought of, saw a picture of, my dad throwing me up in the air at the beach. I went into the air facing the open sky, and the proprioceptive sensations of that playful toss got stored in my doylic memory, and in the process got associated with the trigger stimulus of seeing the unbroken sky in my visual field. Thereafter, whenever I saw that unbroken view of the sky, I felt that fearful falling-up sensation. The conceptual memory of the toss into the air will replace the fearful feeling of flying off the surface of the earth from now on.
The desert captivated Saint-Exupéry as these passages below illustrate. The first one is about the chief of the Port Etienne airport in the Sahara who had a three-leaf portable park. It was his garden in the desert.
[page 135] Someone had sent him from France, three thousand miles away, a few boxes of real soil, and out of this soil grew three green leaves which we caressed as if they had been jewels. The commandant would say of them, "This is my park." And when there arose one of those sand-storms that shriveled everything up, he would move the park down into the cellar.
The second passage is about three Saharan Moors who were flown to the French Alps and led by their guide up to a tremendous waterfall. They, who back home would march for days to find a muddy pool of water mixed with camel urine to drink, were overwhelmed by this cataract of sparkling pure water pouring in wanton profusion in front of them. They stood transfixed.
[page 144] "That's all there is to see," their guide had said."Come."
"We must wait."
"Wait for what?"
"The end."
They were waiting for the moment when God would grow weary of His madness. They knew Him to be quick to repent, knew He was miserly.
"But that water has been running for a thousand years!"
And this was why, at Port Etienne, they did not too strongly stress the matter of the waterfall. There were certain miracles about which it was better to be silent.
On a flight from Paris to Saigon, he and his navigator Prévot went down in the desert and spent many days marching in various directions searching unsuccessfully for water until, near death, they were finally rescued by Bedouins. This crash gave him a close-up view of the desert that he wove into his classic tale, The Little Prince.
The gold prospector wields his pickaxe, and the prisoner in chains wields his pickaxe. The same action, but with drastically different meaning.
[page 292] What all of us want is to be set free. The man who sinks his pickaxe into the ground wants that stroke to mean something. The convict's stroke is not the same as the prospector's, for the obvious reason that the prospector's stroke has meaning and the convict's stroke has none. It would be a mistake to think that the prison exists at the point where the convict's stroke is dealt. Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison; the horror resides in the failure to enlist all those who swing the pick in the community of mankind.
We all yearn to escape from prison.
We all yearn to be free, but freedom is more than the absence of constraints, it is a way of being, a way of using that most precious property that we all have, a human life.
[page 243] Human drama does not show itself on the surface of life. It is played out not in the visible world, but in the hearts of men. . . . Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
Henry David Thoreau burned with such an intensity in his tiny cabin at Walden Pond. What he wrote out of that intensity set a fire in the heart of Mohandas Ghandi who set his countrymen free. Ghandi set a fire in the heart of Martin Luther King who set his people free.
In this closing sentence of the book, Saint-Exupéry conjures up the creation story of God breathing life into Adam. It has the power to remind us that this story is played out whenever a human spirit, an emigré, searching for its homeland, enters a physical body at birth.
[306] only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create Man.
The wind of the Spirit, blown from the stars, enters the sand of the physical body and life begins anew. In our very essence we are all Wind, Sand, and Stars.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~^~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here is a sample of what various reviewers at the time said of this book whose French title was Terre des hommes, quoted from Stacy Schiff's Saint-Exupéry — A Biography.
[page 309] Generally Terre des hommes either made poets of its reviewers or drove them to hyperbole. "This volume is put together with rigor, with an evenness and a dignity that evoke fierce admiration. This universe in which danger, anguish, fear, and death must constantly be surmounted is described with a total lack of theatrics, without affect. No word seems to me better to characterize this work than modesty, which is, as we know, both a virtue in the world of heroics and a secret of literary effectiveness," wrote Sartre's great friend Paul Nizan in Ce Soir: "Saint-Exupéry, aviator and moralist, is blessed with a sumptuous and refined talent. The most striking images and passages of the most exquisite style abound in his work. Since the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, I do not know if anyone has so skillfully coaxed poetry out of prose," declared Andre Therive in Le Temps. Edmond Jaloux placed Saint-Exupéry squarely in two traditions, evoking the names of Plutarch and Emerson on the one hand and Columbus and Magellan on the other.
In America, Wind, Sand and Stars was hailed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review as "a beautiful book, and a brave book. and a book that should be read against the confusion of this world, if only that we may retain 'our pride in humanity and our excitement in this modern age." Launched with fanfare by Reynal & Hitchcock, it was reviewed as well on the June covers of The Saturday Review and the New York Herald Tribune Books section, and quickly became a best-seller. "To read it is to forget we are earthbound," raved the Atlantic reviewer, who like several American critics knew little of Saint-Exupéry but made of him a quick study, describing the book's "contrasting moods of loneliness and human warmth, of exhilaration and the merciless exposure of nerves and sanity." (Many of Saint-Exupéry's friends would have howled with laughter had they read the Herald Tribune review, in which Ben Ray Redman, noting the author's quibble that most men are half-asleep in their lives, wrote, "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is awake and would awaken others.") In October, a month after war had been declared, Wind, Sand and Stars read just as well in London, where The Spectator's reviewer was struck by Saint-Exupéry's "God-like tolerance for the pettiness and folly of mankind." "He touches nothing which he does not illuminate," wrote the Times Literary Supplement's critic of this book of "visions and dreams," rarely described in any country as anything less than a "hymn," a "poem," an "adventure in prose," or a "rhapsody." The fan mail poured in, from such disparate admirers as Le Corbusier and King Leopold of Belgium.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Check out Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Citadelle whose English title is Wisdom of the Sands.
인간은 장애물을 만나 그것을 극복하고자 할 때 자신에 대하여 가장 잘 알 수 있다.
그저 이런 어려움은 이 길을 먼저간 선배들도 모두 겪었다고 생각하게.
그리고 다른 사람들이 다 무사히 이겨냈으니 자네도 이겨낼 수 있다고 생각하게
그는 호수나 산맥에 대한 설명이나 인구의 분포상황, 가축은 어떤 것들이 얼마나 자라고 있는지에 대한 설명은 전혀 하지 않았다.
그는 그 근처 밭에 우뚝 서 있는 세 그루의 오렌지 나무에 대한 이야기를 했다.
그 나무들은 매우 중요하니 자네 지도에 꼭 표시해 두게
자네는 그 숲 속에 아무것도 없는 줄 알지? 천만에야
비행기 바퀴 밑으로 다투어 달려든 서른 마리의 양을 생각해보게...
이런 식으로 내 스페인 지도는 등불 밑에서 동화의 나라로 변해가고 있었다...
당신들은 자신들의 무사안일 속에서 꽉 짜여진 규범을 지키며 바람과 모래와 별들을 막기 위한 초라한 성벽을 쌓았다.
당신들은 업적을 남길 힘든 일에 낄 생각도 못한 채 자신의 안일에만 몰두했을 것이다.
당신들은 떠돌아다니는 별에 사는 인간이 아니며 대답이 없는 질문은 생각도 하지 않는다.
조금이라도 여유가 없으면 아무도 당신의 어깨를 잡지 않는다.
당신을 만들어낸 진흙이 굳어버려 어느 누구도 당신 영혼 안에 깃들어 있을 음악가, 시인, 천문학자를 다시 깨워 일으킬 수 없을 것이다.
오랜 벗이란 만들어지는 게 아니다.
함께 했던 추억들, 함께 겪은 고통의 시간, 오해로 인한 언쟁과 화해 이보다 더 소중한 것은 없는 것이다.
인생이란 이런 것이다. 우리는 당장의 가치를 따지지 않고 먼 훗날 을 위해 나무를 심는다.
직업의 위대함은 무엇보다도 인간과 인간을 화합시키는데 있는 것 같다. 사치 중에 가장 고귀한 사치는 인간관계의 화합일 것이다.
사람들의 마음속에 자리잡고 있는 희망 중 자신이 최선을 다하여 해결할 수 있는 책임
곧 사람이 된다는 것은 바로 책임을 느낄 줄 아는 것이다.
생명이 생명과 너무나 잘 어울리고 거세게 몰아치는 바람 가운데 서도
꽃과 꽃이 있는 세상에서 인간들만이 그들의 고독을 쌓고 있다.
사과나무 아래에 펼쳐 놓은 보자기는 사과만을 받을 수 있고
별들 아래에 펼쳐 놓은 보자기는 별가루만을 받을 수 있다.
그 구멍이 난 것은 누구의 잘못도 아니었다
구차한 변명을 늘어놓는 자를 경멸로 대하는 귀족 같은 모습을 하고 있었다.
원체 낡아놔서 원...
그렇게 말하는 이의 어조가 어찌나 천진스러운지...
그렇게 날카롭던 소녀의 눈이 처음으로 잘못되어 바보를 멋진 왕자로 보이게 하였다. 그 바보가 시를 흥얼거리면 그를 시인이라고 부른다.
그가 마루에 뚫린 구멍을 이해하고 망구스를 좋아하는 줄 안다. 잘 가꾼 정원만을 좋아할 줄 아는 그에게 자연상태인 그녀의 마음을 준다.
그러면 이 바보는 공주를 자기 노예로 데려가는 것이다.
세월의 흐름을 많은 평범한 사람들은 깊이 생각하지 않는다.
사하라가 제 모습을 드러내는 것은 우리 내부에서다.
사하라에 접근하는 것은 오아시스를 찾는 일이 아니라 물을 우리의종교로 만드는 일이다.
미미한 감정이지만 누군가가 멀리서 내게 말해 주는 것 같았다.
그것이 본능이란 것일까?
우리가 그 안에 살고 있는 질서의 세계란 것은 자기 자신이 거기에 갇히지 않고서는 헤아릴 수 없는 것이다
자기를 인간이라고 믿고는 있으나 자신이 느끼지 못하는 어떤 압력에 의하여 마치 개미처럼 그 용도에 맞게 짜부러진 이 인간들을 더 이상 이해할 수 없다. 그들이 한가로울 때 그들은 무엇으로 그들의 터무니없이 하찮은 일요일을 보내는 것일까?
진리란 논리로써 증명될 수 있는 것이 아니다.
흙 한 무더기 속에서 오렌지 나무가 풍성한 열매를 맺을 수 있다면 오렌지 나무에게 있어서는 바로 이 흙더미가 진리인 것이다.
우리가 공통되는 이상 그리고 관심이 없는 이상을 다른 사람과 함께 나눌 수 있을 때 비로소 우리는 자유로운 호흡을 하는 것이다.
어려운 상황에 처해 있는 동료를 구하기 위해 비행기를 타고 가 본 비행사는 이 세상의 그 어떠한 기쁨도 이것과 비교하면 부질없다는
것을 알고 있다. 아마 이것이 현대의 세계가 무너지는 것 같다고 느끼게 되는 이유일 것이다.
진정한 인간으로 만들기 위해서는 그들의 의식주를 충족시켜 줘야 한다고 믿었던 때도 있다.
그러나 그 결과가 내적인 생활이 없는 조잡한 상인, 우둔한 정치가, 서투른 기술자임을 이제 우리는 알고 있다.
자각하는 정도의 차이는 있지만 모든인간은 진정한 의미로 살고픈 욕망을 갖고 있다.
어째서 우리는 서로를 증오해야 된다는 말인가?
우리들은 모두 똑같은 이유 속에서 살고 있고 똑같은 행성을 타고 같은 세상을 살고 똑같은 배의 승무원이 되었다.
한 편의 시 속에서 기적을 볼 수 있고 음악으로부터 순수한 기쁨을 취할 수있고 친구들과 빵을 나누어 먹을 수 있는 사람은 신선한 바닷바람이 불어오는 곳으로 자기의 창문을 열 수 있는 사람이다. 그건 사람이 인간의 언어를 배우는 것이다.
하루의 일과가 끝나면 남자는 자기 마음을 전하기 위해 싸구려 꽃다발이라도 한아름 그녀의 가슴에 안겨주었는지도 모른다.
너무도 부끄럼을 많이 타고 세련되지 못한 남자는 자신의 이런 행동이 촌스러워 보이지나 않을까 노파심에 속을 태웠을지도 모른다.
이런 바보스런 남자의 태도에 여자는 망설였고 그 망설임에 남자는 난생 처음 겪어보는 사랑병에 더욱 애간장을 태웠을 것이다
그러나 설사 그 괴로움의 도가 더할 나위 없이 깊고 심오했다 하더라도 그래도 그때의 그가 진짜 인간이 아니었을까?
그때만 해도 그는 진정으로 살았었노라고 말할 수 있지 않을까?
마당에 장미꽃 하나가 새로이 탄생하면 정원사는 세상에 둘도 없는 경사가 난 듯 호들갑을 떨며 금방 물을 준다 비료를 준다 야단을 떨지만 하나의 생명이 새로 탄생하였을 때 사람들은 전혀 감동됨이 없이 무관심하다. 한심한 풍경이 아닐 수없다. 꽃을 가꾸는 정원사는 있어도 인간을 길러 주는 정원사는 없는 것이다.
뛰어난 재능을 가지고 태어난 어린 모차르트도 다른 평범한 여느 아이들과 마찬가지로 판에 박힌 교육을 받았다면 판에 박힌 성인이 되고 말았을 것이다.
나를 가장 슬프게 하는 것은 이 세상에 쓸 만한 정원사가 너무도 부족하다는 것이다.
인간 각자에게서 조금씩 소멸되어 없어지는 저 모차르트의 천재성에 대하여 나는 이렇게 괴로워하고 있는 것이다.
영혼의 대지 위에 숨쉴 때
오직 신성한 정신만이 인간을 창조할 수 있는 것이다.
I went back to my sleeping car. I said to myself: Their fate causes these people no suffering. It is not an impulse to charity that has upset me like this. I am not weeping over an eternally open wound. Those who carry the wound do not feel it. It is the human race and not the individual that is wounded here, is outraged here. I do not believe in pity. What torments me tonight is the gardener's point of wiew. What torments me is not the poverty to which after all a man can accustom himself as easily as to sloth. Generations of Orientals live in filth and live it. What torments me is not the humps nor the hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart Murdered.
Only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create Man.
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1198592
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