Two Political Speeches And A Hermit's Monologue

The Consul and Head of Government: These are the days of Resolve and Backbone, when the aesthetic gives way to the moral, and the moral to the necessary. Years of experience and power have made us the skilled adepts. We alone in this community can be trusted to make way for the future's timely arrival. We have written encyclopedias of our history, and one truth has prevailed, at once simple and complete: the WHOLE is greater than its parts, and must be our foremost concern. Those of us who live small live are of small concern. Those who live middling lives serve the WHOLE and are expendable after their service. But those whose vision is transcendent, those who can envision an eternal form for the WHOLE, those special few both serve and thrive. This is the essence of wisdom. The gods we worship are gods of power: they have ordained the maintenance of the WHOLE, and achieving that end is our total destiny. Future encyclopedias will record this: our steadfast service to the WHOLE, our loyalty, our resolve and backbone across the centuries. A TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE: They say openly most of us are fuel for the machinery of the WHOLE to consume. Our souls are surely forfeit to the same machine that grinds our bodies back to the original dust. As we blink out one by one like lanterns after a feast, these transcendent ones preen and pose and display their fine taste in clothes and manners manners. Such was their education, nothing more lofty than fashion... At those festivals they sponsor, we can stuff ourselves with wine and meat, and we feel the surfeit of abandon - for a few drunken days and nights. Then comes the reckoning, when they declare they will take by right our food, our freedom. Our bodies can endure this hardship, we have the resolved backbone they lack. But our souls are bereft, they require the freedom to reach that place purged of aristocrats. Friends, I envision a day, even now being prepared in a cosmic alembic, when the calculations of the WHOLE are abandoned, and we revive the simple life, the life good for all. We resolve to seize the future to attain our glory, body and soul! A HERMIT-POET IN THE HIGH HILLS We have trudged along the mountain path for over two hours of silence. But we can talk now. I wanted you first to experience the silence we love and seek every day. I need the discipline of silence to finish my epic poem, others are polishing philosophical essays, and still others study the Earth or the Stars. And one among us is writing about Love! All this we do in these heights: against the background of the City's materialism and waste. If you truly wish to join our community, you must make resolutions... Look, my friend, look at that immense cloud bank in the west. Its light slanting as it descends to briefly shower us with pure energy. It may also inspire your poem, or mine, or both. At very least - listen closely - it will create in each of us an inner state indistinguishable from prayer... There are those below for whom cloud, light, inner state, and prayer are meaningless. They have no access to wonder. And this landscape is too rugged for them, so they keep their distance from us. You may conclude we scoff at their pretense as philosophers. No, we don't. In fact we wish them well, in fact we would help them if they asked. Everything, all of us and the creatures, and trees, and waterways, everything coheres into a wholeness of being they are blind to, you have sensed this wholeness. What I can tell you: it is your destiny - seize it now forever!