Hyperion to Bellarmin
Diotima’s sudden pallor, when she read Alabanda’s letter, pierced my soul. She then began, calmly and earnestly, to advise me against this step, and we spoke much back and forth. ‘O you men of violence!’ she cried at last, ‘you who are so quick to go to the extreme, remember Nemesis!’
‘For those who suffer extremes,’ I said, ‘for them extreme is right.’
‘Even if it’s right,’ she said, ‘it’s not what you were born for.’
‘So it would seem,’ I said, ‘I’ve loitered long enough. Oh, Id like to load an Atlas on my shoulders to discharge the debts of my youth. Do I have a sense of myself? do I have inner stability? Oh, let me go, Diotima! It’s here, in just such work as this, that I must gain it.’
‘That’s sheer hubris!’ Diotima cried; ‘you were lately more modest, lately when you said: “first I must go forth to learn”.’
‘Dear sophist!’ I cried, ‘our talk then was of something completely different. Leading my people to the Olympus of divine beauty, where from springs for ever young there flows the true with all things good, is something I’m not yet fit to do. But I’ve learnt to use a sword, and for now that’s all that’s needed. The new covenant of spirits can’t live in the
air, the holy theocracy of the beautiful must have a free state to live in, and that demands space on earth and this space we shall surely conquer.’
‘You will conquer,’ cried Diotima, ‘and forget what for? at best you'll force your free state into being and then say: “for what have I built?” Oh! it will have been consumed, all the beautiful life that was to stir there will have been spent, even in you! The savage struggle will tear you apart, beautiful soul, you will grow old, blissful spirit! and life- weary ask at the end, “where are you now, you ideals of my youth?”’
‘That’s cruel, Diotima,’ I cried, ‘grasping the heart in this way, holding me fast by my own fear of death, by my highest joy of life, but no! no! no! bondage kills, but a just war brings every soul alive. It’s what gives to gold the colour of the sun, that it gets thrown into the fire! This and only this gives to man his whole youth, that he bursts his bonds asunder! It’s this alone can save him, that he goes forth and crushes the viper underfoot, the crawling century that poisons in the bud all beautiful nature! — You say I'll grow old, Diotima! if I liberate Greece? grow old and wretched, a mean little man? Oh, then he must have been right sapless and empty and godforsaken, that Athenian youth, the victory messenger from Marathon, when he came over the peak of Pentelikon and looked down into the vales of Attica!’
‘Dearest! dearest!’ cried Diotima, ‘be still! I won’t say another word. You shall go, you shall go, proud man! Oh! when you're like this I have no power, no claim over you.’
She wept bitterly and I stood before her like a criminal. ‘Forgive me, divine maiden!’ I cried, sunk down before her, ‘oh, forgive me that I must! I’m not making a choice, I’m not deliberating. There’s a power within me and I cannot tell if it’s my self that drives me to this step.’ ‘It’s your full soul that commands you,’ she answered. ‘Not to follow it often leads to ruin, but then following it likely does too. It’s best you go, for that is greater. You act; I will bear it.’