Making A Difference: The Face Behind The Face ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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Subject: MAKING A DIFFERENCE: THE FACE BEHIND THE FACE

"Man is isolated even as things are: he cannot permit himself the dangerous luxury of inner isolation. I hate the idea of forced collectivism, in which faces are erased in the name of fearlessness. It is a miserable parody of what overcoming isolation really means. Isolation grows even deeper if it becomes collective. But every face has its inner face, of which we are sometimes wary, or else downright afraid. If we only stopped being frightened of revealing to each other these inner faces, we would see how close and akin to one another, how inseparable we really are. Only masks hate each other. Our faces cannot hate one another but our faces are covered by masks.

Mankind is essentially a single organism, a single body, a single soul. But can we imagine a body surviving if it were hacked into little pieces (even if in these little pieces artificial dams were to be constructed, for normal blood circulation)? Would anybody withstand such bestial torture? Yet mankind endures, somehow; even hacked to pieces it somehow exists, and its separate little pieces pulsate, breather, hope, strive to coalesce. Clearly mankind is a special kind of organism, a special kind of body and soul, possessing supernatural powers of survival. The translation of various literatures from language to language is a mysteriously powerful mutual transfusion of blood between the sliced-up pieces of the single body of mankind. Were this not so, mankind would not survive. I would like to quote the words of Thomas Wolfe, from the forty-seventh chapter of his magnificent book YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN: 'The evils that we hate, you no less than I, cannot be overthrown with shrugs and sighs and shakings of the head, however wise. It seems to me that they but mock at us and only become more bold when we retreat before them and take refuge in the affirmation of man's tragic average To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just so much, to make it so for ever.'"

- intro to THE FACE BEHIND THE FACE by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ISBN 0714526177)



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the dawn by and by


the clock is ticking
time is running out of time
if today were the last day
what on earth would you do?

the human voice lives inside
the silence,
the night approaches
with moonlit shadows
and the dawning of every civilization
by and by.

a lone wolf howls.


Peace and Light,
Anna