With pain in our hearts, removing each page and draft sheet from the bounds of this book, literally tearing them away, literally banishing them — those authentic acts of defiance towards their cruel time — and with each sheet set aside leaving aside a heavy portion of the epoch’s monstrously vast mass and the deeply incised Charentsian brand, imprint, word upon that portion,
we set the bounds of this volume on the first centenary of the birth of the great thinker, great citizen of the world, sworn fighter for his homeland, giant of literature, and the sixtieth anniversary of his death — murder, suicide, self-withdrawal, self-immolation —
with far greater regret for the Charents-forged imprint, brand, attitude and word left outside this selection than for the historical background,
because
before us who live today, in the valley of the battle of life and death, the epoch has risen in its same monstrously absurd mass. Sixty years and a hundred years seem to have removed nothing, sunk nothing into the ocean of time; before us, the speechless survivors, the epoch twists in the heavy coils of that same monster, whole peoples and homelands are going mad,
while the great contemplator, who also marvels — not the one who retreats, not the terror-stricken, but the great marveller, as only hostile giants marvel at each other’s arms and adornments, as only the earth itself beholds its flowering and collapse — the great contemplator who also confronts, struggles, fights, battles fang against fang with the epoch, inflicts wounds like chasms upon it and receives deep wounds, is not we, the living;
it is he, Charents, the warrior and king who disowned not a single moment of this enduring battle for the human homeland, avoided not a single fight, the warrior who shed his blood to reach the height of a throne.
The grandeur of his emergence eighty years ago and the magnitude of his loss sixty years ago he saw in precisely this immense scale:
that through his word a sunlit world of sovereign human beings opens; a people casts off its serfdom, the lowest shackles of voicelessness; a people stands up for a splendid exchange of words with its age; a country becomes the homeland of the free;
and with the closing of his eyelids a world will close, a homeland will turn away from its children as from strangers; with his silence time itself will fall silent, will become estranged, will become hostile, will evade the speech of our generations as a language incomprehensible, unfamiliar, even hostile;
and the very need for him must raise from the past of a hundred years and of sixty years the one who subjugates times and spaces; and times and spaces must, like great empires before their conqueror, recognise and submit to their singular sovereign.