This book of movement, struggle and journey—this Book of the Way; this flood of the light of knowledge over our wordless pastures; this creative gaze that draws us out of the anonymous mass and gives us a face and a name, seeing itself in each of us and each of us in itself; this sharp, angry cry driving us from the camps of silent submission; this faithful, plaintive howl of a gampr before the heavy bonds of our human homeland; this sworn effort to wrest our human image from the stone of violence—all this became our power to leave the beast behind, to shake off the stone. And it also laid bare the full measure of our own ineradicable hostility towards that liberating power: the book was consigned to the flames.
If, in this eternal destruction and endless renewal, the word bears sin and grace—and it does: ‘In the beginning was the Word’—then this book of the believing word opened up our present between past and future, the present of people who had not lost themselves. And this Book of the Way we burned,
and there opened and unfolded, stretching on for years, the barren world of the corrupted word: a world of silent slaughter, yoked servitude and voiceless submission. But that silent kingdom of the falsified word lies beyond the boundary pillars of the Book’s high, sweeping triumphal arch; the book has no gates opening onto that land. On this side of the arch is our Charentsian world of noble human beings, the renewed world of the uncorrupted word, our native fortress wrought in copper, and the copper wolf upon its façade.