Sterjo SPASSE
PROSE
Excerpt from the novel "WHY!?"
It is better to be ruled by an inanimate
yet visible object than by philosophy which is invisible! It
is better to become a murderer with a rifle than by thoughts.
Only a few people are killed with a rifle whereas thousands are
killed by thoughts. I know that books have alienated me from
life and that philosophy has caused me to lose my feelings as
a human being. Love was not born for me, nothing was created
for me! I was born superfluous in this world; I sat down to the
dinner table by mistake. Having wished so desperately to right
some of the wrongs of man, I find myself with no one close to
me in this world. I am not even close to myself. I am like a
reed floating in the middle of the ocean and shall soon sink
to the very bottom of the sea. And I must drown, for though alive,
I am as if dead. It is all the same to me... No one should pardon
me for that which the world calls sin, for I pardon no one, especially
not the philosophers. As for my body after death, I am a Diogenes.
Let it rot where it collapses; let it be devoured by the first
wild beasts that find it. But if mankind cannot endure such a
thing and insists on burying me, then I have one wish. Let them
bury me in a lonely spot, surrounded by thorns and thistles,
without a tear or a lament, without offerings or mourning clothes,
because for me:
A world of nothing, from nothing
for nothing,
revolves around the essence of
nothing!’
The villagers buried their only intellectual with due respect,
but in a lonely spot - at the top of a hill overlooking the village
where the gentle breezes blow from all directions. In the shade
of a wild rose lies the young man’s simple grave. On it
there is no name, no date or sign. All that is inscribed are
his last words:
A world of nothing, from nothing
for nothing,
revolves around the essence of
nothing!
A young man on the path of the
philosophers.
[Nga jetë në jetë
- Pse!?, Korça: Drita 1935, translated from the Albanian
by Robert Elsie, and first published in English in History
of Albanian literature, New York, vol. 1, p. 476-477] |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Classical
Authors (19th - early 20th centuries)
