Herbert Howarth is a young English poet who served with the British administration in Palestine from 1943 to 1945, when he resigned in protest against his government’s policy. The evening described here took place in 1945; Mr. Howarth’s resignation from the British Palestine administration had caused quite a stir, and this night of poetry was one of the ways in which the Jews of Tel Aviv thanked him for his solidarity with them. The article published here forms the last chapter of Mr. Howarth’s still unpublished account of his experience in Palestine called Once in Israel.
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“These people can teach us how to live,” said Bill Williams to me in an aside after dinner. “They get a new blow every day, curfews, assaults, searches, yet still they go on extracting good out of life.”
Some of us were guests at a party at Hemda’s. The evening was advancing. We sat round in a large ring, our dinner heavy in us, warmed by the lights and the friendliness.
There was not much to talk about. We had not been brought together as people who wanted to talk to each other. Bill Williams started to sing, softly and persuasively, mustering his Welsh sweetness. It was the day after his speech at the Moghrabi Theater when he had jumped up, unannounced, and told in Hebrew how he, like other administrators, was ashamed of the administration’s policy, how he could not sleep at nights for it, how he would do all in his power to further illegal immigration. The magic of that moment was still on him.
He was singing the poem that Rachel made when she was dying of tuberculosis on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. She had loved a labor leader, and he had loved her, but when he learned of her illness, he had married someone else, and she wrote bitter poems:
The other is with him in the light
Before the face of the people—
I only in the dark, the empty shadow.
She compared herself to Mikhal, who was neglected by David for ten years while he was fickle with all women, yet she loved him passionately and constantly. Then in the last days, with the sun changing the colors of the Galilee water every declining minute, she invoked her past:
Did it all happen?—
Did I go out with the morning star
And work the earth with sweat of my
hands?—
O my Galilee, Galilee of my soul . . . .
Bill sang it with its simple, longing melody. No one murmured. A sadness came on me; I looked into the infinite ravines of man’s hunger to help man; with a mind as night-soft as tears I remembered the words of T. E. Lawrence, his sense of the dedicated desolation of those “who give their lives to an alien people.”
Next they looked at me and I recited Yeats, one of the few poems I still remembered whole, for poems were already beginning to disintegrate in my memory, except a few, like Shelley’s “Indian Serenade” learned at the very threshold of adolescence. Some parts of “A Woman Young and Old” were with me still, and I began:
What lively lad most pleasured me?
and held my voice at a subdued feminine pitch through to
But when our soul, this body off,
Naked to naked goes . . . .
Sara, blond and insipid, yet a dancer who should have known better, laughed out loud, fantastically. Then the beautifully fair, blue-eyed Musgrave suddenly began to recite in French. Looking down at his feet like a schoolboy, using the deep vibrating uncontrolled tones of a schoolboy, he recited. Emotion brimmed in him, both for the sake of the poem, and for the act of being un-English and speaking emotion aloud. We sat silent and listened. Eight months later he was dead, his ambitions and his beauty were under the rubble of the King David explosion. It is not only England who kills her friends. Perhaps it is inherent in the structure of love for a people that those who most love a land die in it and from it.
Shortly after ten o’clock I went downstairs. Some days earlier, in the Tamar Café, Arieh Lerner and the poetess Bat-Miriam had arranged that the poets in Tel Aviv should call a sort of concilium for a farewell meeting with me before my departure for England.
“All right,” I said, flipping through my diary. “About ten o’clock next Thursday night.”
Bat-Miriam showed a faint look of alarm, but corrected it quickly. The “Bohemian” doctrine has still not died out among Palestine writers and artists. When I said we would start at ten, Bat-Miriam assumed that I was a subscriber to it, and I did not tell her the awful truth that, like most English writers, I was a respectable sleep-hoarder and normality-merchant.
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When the evening came I was naturally loath to go. Again in conformity with English practice. Some relics of the past like Larry Durrell keep up a sort of salon habit, but most people who feel about art are terrified of salons. Just as Lasker-Schüler was. I felt that real poetry is not in the salon, but in the sort of room I was leaving, where it comes out suddenly by itself from springs of natural sentiment. It never came in a salon, where each person posed, pretended, dissimulated out of fear of the others. So I began by leaving Hemda’s too late, and then manufactured various excuses for not getting to Bat-Miriam’s, such as forgetting the address or not being able to locate it.
But Minna found me. Gentle and loyal and good, and no one else cared for me so unselfishly as she did, she guided me towards the house. Not because she wanted to force the soirée on me, but because she did not want the people there to talk badly of me for letting them down.
Rather bare stone stairs link the apartments in Tel Aviv’s blocks of flats. We found our way up a stone flight to Bat-Miriam’s. As we were later even than Tel Aviv usually is (it prides itself on unpunctuality), the large drawing room was already full when we entered. Some famous faces glowed up—Shlonsky with his long mane of hair fluffed back as though a barber’s drying fan had been blowing on it; the queenly oval of Rovina’s features; the witch-like intelligence of Malkah Locker. There were gaps, too. “Where’s Alterman?” I murmured to Arieh Lerner. “O, he’s such a prima donna,” said Arieh apologetically. I was hurt for a minute; perhaps some of the other people in that room will last when Nathan Alterman is forgotten, but for this generation Alterman is the spokesman and singer; and I had worked lovingly on the translation of his political tirade against Attlee, which Erich Winter had given me, and his poem about the “Elephants of Heaven” that Ofra and Zuriha had taught me in a chance meeting one Saturday night in a coffee house.
“And where’s Uri Zvi?” The poets in the room belonged chiefly to the Left, and so apparently they had been unable to invite the passionate red-haired man whose laments for Europe, verse howling on verse, were to fill the literary supplements of Haaretz through the coming year. His head and long, thin frame look as if chiselled out of a filament of brass; the ginger freckles and the ginger lashes over astigmatic eyes say that fire consumed him, scorched away all dross; he is a man blazing away, yet miraculously renewed after each poem. In the idyllic days when Palestine set out on her journey he wrote the lyrics of Anacreon’s Pool; today after the war and the six million Jewish dead, he writes of the Gentiles draining their bloody goblets and the mantle of Elijah flagellating the air.
Shlonsky had already drunk a good deal, according to his regular Homeric practice. He threw his arms round me and took me over to a settee. I found myself shyly wedged between Orland and Leah Goldberg. I had never met Orland before. He was young and good-looking. A runic riddle started running in my head, and I remembered it was a verse of his that Ofra had taught me:
Many a note I played
And never a note understood
But the note I understood
I never knew how to play.
He was quiet amid the bacchanal, had a sort of Oxford restraint, and it was easy to sit by him and to “rest in oneself,” while waiting to see how the evening would go.
Bat-Miriam got up. She had already been standing but all the same she now quite distinctly got up, partly because the other people sat down, and partly because she rose in herself, deliberately sloughed off the skin of daily intercourse and bade the priestess emerge. Just as the Sybil grew greater when she prophesied. She read from her poem, “The Land of Israel,” about the puzzlement of Palestine:
Your falling wing crowns the penumbra
Of city, mountain, and desert place.
And my hurricane longings are gathered
To the rainbow of your hidden face.I cannot grasp you, o disclosing-disappear-
ing,
You never will be wholly understood.
And I shall stand like a frozen question
With your sorrow written on my blood . . . .
Then, with no transition, she proceeded in the same high, reedy, inspired Hebrew to speak a COMMENTARY to us, about ourselves, about the fact of our unity that evening in troubled Palestine, our unity, being English and Jewish people mixed, as poets and lovers of poetry, who summon the nations to judge not by expediency but according to human rights. “All the nations in all their languages are telling the same story and singing of one ultimate purpose. Those who truly decipher that purpose and who are therefore the consecrated bearers of the Word are the poets. O ancient believers . . . we can inspire one another, we are being inspired by one another. . . .”
She wilted, shrivelled, retreated into the husk of daily behavior. Shlonsky asked us all to drink, and led us. Then he pointed at a short stout man, who up to that moment had been inconspicuously intent on projecting himself on to a beautiful girl in a window seat.
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Menashe Levin turned towards the room, and as he began to speak, in a quiet concentrated French, I saw that under the smooth corpulence of his face there was an active critical faculty which constantly kept watch in the dark of the flesh. Modern Hebrew poetry and mysticism he talked of. “Everyone knows how the Golem lay in the loft of the synagogue in Prague. That great cumbersome frame, its limbs so heavy that had one foot been lifted it would, when replaced, have smitten the floor like a sledgehammer and shaken the foundations of the houses. Was not the Hebrew language like that for two thousand years? It lay inert. It awaited a time when spirit would be breathed into it, when a divine propulsion would be in its sinews and make light of the magnitude of its parts. When we Jews began to come back to Palestine that time began. The Hebrew poetry of the first generations of immigrants, the poetry of masters like Bialik and Tchernachovsky, who were born in the old world of persecution but came to live and die in the new world of our autonomy, represents the first stirrings of the Golem as it wakes. Now it is moving about the roof of the temple and breaking the hasps of the hatch. Perhaps not we, but our children will see it in the streets, rushing in the sunshine.
“I have not accidentally chosen this image of the Golem to define where we are. It is one of the dominant images of popular Jewish mysticism; and mysticism is inextricably woven with our poetry and our whole cultural achievement, even with Marx and the old guard of revolutionaries like Radek. During the centuries of exile little of life—little of the joy of life—was vouchsafed to us. From the meagerness of our portion of joy we became excessively afraid of death. Each of us felt it intolerable that life should wither to its end with our deprivation uncompensated. Why should we be cut off from the loveliness which we had inherited equally with all souls on earth? The wide dispersion of these feelings, the signs of which you may see today in the despair with which a Jewish family mourns death in the face of all the comforts of religion, puts Jewish mysticism on a much broader, more popular basis than with other peoples. The mysticism of the Zohar and Cabala is essentially the same as the mysticism of Tao or the Upanishads, but the latter was confined to the few disciples who could prevail upon themselves to undergo the disciplines whose voluntary rigors were the index of restrictionism and exclusivity. Among the Jews of the Exile the high general level of alertness combined with the effects of the visible discrimination of Gentile majorities against Jewish minorities to produce energetic mysticism throughout every coherent group. The exceptions in a Jewish community in the Exile were the non-mystics; the Orthodox clergy, for example, who fought against this spontaneous cultural growth. While the eyes of the people ranged the horizons for the Messiah, a rabbi like Jochanan would declare. ‘When the Messiah comes, I will not know him.’ If the coming of the Messiah meant freedom and joy, it also meant the struggle to obtain these things under his banner, and that meant bloodshed and convulsions. Religion could not but turn away. But the people saw the joy beyond the struggle, and so they let the flower of belief grow in their hearts.
“Here is the secret of the poetry we are writing. We who are using Hebrew are still the voice of the people. We were bred in their mysticism and its human faith.”
“You call us poets of Jewish mysticism,” said Shlonsky, taking over from him. “Let me read you a poem I wrote yesterday. Maybe it comes from our national mystique, maybe just from a Tel Aviv delirium. Last night I was on a bus going down the boulevard near the new Habimah theater. The orange blossom smells blow in through the breach in the houses there. A verse started shaping in my head. I dropped off the bus, went into a café, and wrote this down.”
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He took a small piece of paper from his pocket and looked at it for a moment, running his fingers through his wind-funnel of hair. “Lo yeuman ke yissuppar” is a common Hebrew saying: “It can’t be believed.” One day during Shlonsky’s youth, when his hair was twice the cloud it is today, there was a report that he had taken it to a hairdresser to be clipped. The story came to Bialik. “Lo yeuman ke yissuppar,” said the old laureate; for the same words also mean in Hebrew “He’s no artist if he had a haircut.”
Heavy, slow, orchestral trochees. Shlonsky, on his feet now, spoke them like an actor, mining in them for their sorrow, for their depth of weariness:
Blowing com, and thorn, turning air
And night. Night, with blowing seeds.
Forgive us, king, our base desire,
Give us release.We bum to wander, wander, wander.
Your command is stay.
We resent. And we conspire.
Be hard on our dishonesty.Force us stop, Force us rest.
Enforce us. We are close to fear.
Fields of seed. Com in the air.
And night, night, and quietness.
What a prayer, a prayer of supplication to God for leave to do penance! It is the conscience of Tel Aviv speaking. We are two hundred thousand in Tel Aviv, it seems to say. We came to this land to remake it, and to do that we should plunge our own hands into the soil and sweat as Anda Pinkerfeld did, and as the boys and girls of the farms do today. Why are we idling in the town? The Gentiles compelled our fathers to be townsmen for years, and our longing for Palestine was mixed with the longing to be in the open, to go to the earth again and roll with it in natural harmony. We poets who stay in the town are demented. Above all others we should know that happiness does not come from idleness. It comes from the immersion of self in sacrifice for a purpose.
So it is, after all, a poem of the Jewish mystique, Shlonsky, I thought. It is a poem of guilt, a poem promising expiation. But I did not say it, for Shlonsky had begun to talk his own COMMENTARY, with a different exegesis.
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“Ours is a poetry of mysticism,” Shlonsky said. “But if we call it that, the world will not understand us. There is much poetry of mysticism in the generally accepted category, but little of it is similar to our work. You will tell an Englishman that we are mystics, and he will think of the burning heart of St. Theresa. And thus he will never understand us. For Jewish mysticism is born out of suffering, but Catholic mysticism is often born out of the desire to suffer. Perhaps we have more in common with the Arab heretics, whose mysticism is the product of oppression. Yet still there is a difference, for Arab mysticism stems from the minority, while ours springs from the corporate body of the people. So in order the better to define ourselves to a world which certainly will not help unless it has begun to understand us, let us abnegate the use of the word mysticism; let us confess simply that we write Poetry of Trouble. We have no option but to write it, if we write at all.
“Look at the output of our friend Alterman. He chose not to be here tonight. We can talk about him the more candidly. He writes two different sorts of poetry. But they differ only in a literary sense. In their social origins they are equally specimens of Trouble Poetry.
He winds himself into a state of mental intoxication and when the intellectual selective faculties are suspended he links beautiful word to beautiful word, without coherence but every one a jewel or a tear. We know that he is under no compulsion to be unintelligent in order to be beautiful. He is not a man who chooses nonsense because he lacks sense. When there is safe material to hand—note that word ‘safe’—he is as much a master of rational beauty as Racine, whose Phèdre he translated into Hebrew with such austere perfection. So the hubble-bubble of these surrealist verses of his—these elephants of heaven that Howarth loves—plainly confers some advantage on him. Like music in imperial Vienna, it confers the power of evading censorship.
“Alterman’s second type of poetry is always at the mercy of the censor. He wrote one day a celestial satire about the ways of a certain high commissioner. Where is that? A skeleton in a censor’s cupboard, I believe. But sometimes the censor holds his hand, and all the people sing his satires. The history of our nation today has been inscribed by Alterman in the poem Davar published last week, about the refugee child who has been hushed out of Europe through danger after danger and at last on these shores of home asks ‘May I cry now?’ Poetry of trouble, poetry of all our trouble is what Alterman is writing. His obscure poetry tells the same tale as his open satires, except that perhaps it resists, from the humane artistic point of view, our own internal party censorship as well as the censorship of the non-Jewish administration.
“There is a relationship between poetry and morals that is not incidental. The world saw it in France during the war. The greatest of the French poets fought in the underground. They sustained the soul of France. Our Jewish struggle has been fought for age on age in the underground of the lands from the pitiful ghetto regions of Little Russia to the tenements of New York. It looks as if we cannot yet come to the surface today in our national home. We fight. And every one of us artists confronts a dilemma: what is the most urgent imperative on me—to go down to the beach and bring in an illegal immigrant or to write a poem? If we choose to write a poem, that choice means that we still have faith—faith after the infinite disillusionments—in the conscience of the nations. They will read our poems, they will behold our troubles in the mirror of the words, they will link their souls with the soul of Palestine in the name of whatever may be beautiful in the society of tomorrow.”
A strange family, the Shlonskys, as wholly artist as the romantic families of the Bronte age sometimes were. His sister Vardina, who knew no English, was stranded in England at the onset of the blitz. She was billeted on two maiden ladies, Christian Scientists, in a wealthy but empty, echoing foreign house at Bedford. Days passed in which she hardly spoke. Then the post brought her a sheaf of new poems from her brother. Their difficult Hebrew and abstruse images cried with the clarity of a remembered voice to her out of far Palestine. She set them to music, and Palestine tingles in the music: “Ba-leila—in the evening. . . .” All is expiated; in Tel Aviv as in the Emek you have redeemed yourself. You have deserved your evening and its pulse of love.
Shlonsky came over and wedged himself onto the settee and hugged me. Leah Goldberg had been displaced by his insertion of himself, and he waved her over to the chair he had previously occupied and told her it was her turn to recite.
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Tall, thin, unlovely, but her eyes refined and sad in their slightly hyper-thyroid magnitude, and her carriage elegant. There is a whimsical observation in her poems, a power of seeing the sorrows of men and animals from new angles.
I am twenty-two. Not beautiful.
The bridges of the unworld lead me
Beyond this smoke, this faint café curl
Of voices that say, and eyes that see, all,
All except me, to the grasses and poppies
And the pollen mottling of the spring cappice.
Gentila Lebel told me that when she was small she and a friend used to go to her father’s editorial office at Davar and rummage through his wastepaper basket for rejected manuscripts of Leah Goldberg’s poems. They read and fed on them. For the Jewish woman in them. For the haunted person behind the dilated eyes.
When Malkah Locker began speaking it sounded at first like a protest against the style that Leah Goldberg and Shlonsky had used in their poems. The poetry of the Symbolists, she said, can only be construed, now that we see it in historical perspective, as the expression of their terror and bewilderment at the coming of the industrial age. From Baudelaire and Wagner onward, the imagery got more out of hand as the 19th century proceeded. Where did the progressive confusion lead?
In 1939 Valéry was sitting with a group of Swiss intellectuals. One told the story of Hider and Einstein. Hitler said that he would honor Einstein as a scientist but put him to death for the propagation of false ethics. Einstein’s comment on this verdict was that he had gained his place in science by effort and labor, Hitler had gained his place in politics through the stupidity of his people. “Yes—through mine too,” said Valéry.
That condemnation of a poetry for which the image had become the sole point of interest, Malkah Locker endorsed. And she swung now into line with Shlonsky and said that poetry must get back in touch with the ethics it had lost.
In her own early poems the moral is hard to trace. Her Yiddish poem about Vienna is simply a composite of scenes and associations common to all of us who think around the name of the city: the cathedral bells, the Danube, the Turks at the gates, Schubert, the ferns on the slopes, the Rosenkavalier. But since 1940 she had been at work (she began to tell us about it, disclosing it for the first time) on a volume that is, in effect, a long Kaddish. The Kaddish is the prayer recited daily for a year after the funeral of a parent by his son: perhaps the child is four or five, and his shrill treble, vocalizing words the sense of which is unknown to him, contrasts with the chorus of elder voices like a bleak and tragic obbligato. Her volume is a prayer commemorating the Jewish deaths in Europe. Night—she sits on a rock drinking night. Shrivelling—she is shrivelled, the cells for pregnancy under the green are dried. The forests of Poland—all shout, and the light shouts, like a prosecutor, “Guilty.” She says—is not mankind conscious of its guilt, its blood-share in the massacre of the millions in Europe?
There was a pause when she had finished. Tel Aviv does not often speak of its losses. Something of its feverish exaltation of mood even arises from the determination not to dwell on the thought of the dead. It will build to avenge them, to provide shelter for those of their children who survive. But how dare it think about them? If a man and his wife stayed at home alone in the evening the memory and the grief would overtake them, and they would be shattered under the impact of the irrecoverable. That is why the streets are full in the twilight. That is why silence is rare in Tel Aviv—to ward off memory. Yet silence fell and no one intervened for a moment.
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Then a murmur of voices. They were asking Rovina to go forward. Till that time
she had unpretentiously sat at the back of the room. She did not make them press her long, but came across the carpet with slow thoughtful dignity. I thought, as I had thought a score of times that year, how great Rovina was, not just as an actress but in life. A nation that has no traditional monarchy to personify its hopes tends to create a king or queen out of the material each age gives. Jewish Palestine has chosen Rovina. On the stage, dominating Habimah, she weeps and rages. They tell the story that when Vachtangov built up the company in Moscow, Rovina, then a provincial school-teacher, came to him for an audition, and that he was unimpressed and inclined to refuse her; she began to weep, and suddenly he looked at her and shouted, “Yes, weep. Go on weeping like that”; and because she could greatly weep, took her. On the stage she keeps the tears, as she can hardly help but do, so much is Habimah’s repertoire the restatement of Jewish persecution in many places and times; but in life she has ennobled all the weeping and infused the grief with the indignant self-respect of the new Palestine.
She stood against the wall, her height increased by the long black evening gown she was wearing, and she clasped her hands under her chin in thought.
Then she tilted her head to the light, and its dignity and oval length softened as she uttered the opening lines of Gnessin’s poem, “The Kiss”:
And should he return from wandering and
come to my country
I shall be at peace.
And should he visit my mother’s house and
I see his face,
See his face once more,
I shall be at peace.And should he look on me—
Even though he look on me and on the
hiding place of my soul as he used to,
With his far-off pity and the great sadness
of a man’s soul—
I shall take on a sullen calm as a soldier
takes his baldrick.
And should he extend his hand in greeting
I shall accept his hand in greeting
I shall calmly accept his large hand—
His warm hand which has and disclaims
security—
And there shall be no remembrance of my
hand’s silly trembling.
I shall be at peace.But should my fortune he that he visits my
house and lies here at night
With me in the shade of one rafter, my
mother’s house,
I will get up in the quiet night and quietly
grope and on the tip of my naked toes
Find his bed in the dark—
And stretched before me, held in sleep’s void
flask,
His limbs moving with joy of the rest that
embraces him
He will not recognize, will feel nothing, his
soul will not dream of me there.I shall bend and kiss him on the chest
I shall quietly draw the blanket fringe and
kiss his chest
And the kiss the kiss of one who murders a
soul.
I shall drink his blood in this kiss!And the blood will be mine to quench my
thirst
It will be balm to still the desire of my sick
lonely soul
Howling like a young she-wolf wracked for
love,
And pressing the stones of silence,
A terrified soul on a brazier
For Love’s kiss which was never kissed
From the day she started to thirst and expect
the sun
Till she withered . . . .
There are songs of Schubert’s in which, after the voice has been detained on a long-held note, he raises the same syllable on to another note which is the first of a new phrase of melody; and in a parallel way Rovina held us all, at the close of her poem, in a long tense pause and then carried the emotion of the pause, on to the first word of a poem of another nature, a ringing, challenging, bitter, pleading poem, one of the great addresses to England written by Alterman during these fateful months of waiting we had just undergone:
We are sisters, Albion, we Jews and you.
We shall play
A match from, coast to coast. You unhitch
your sword
For the old match, the old game. A kind
of commerce
Between the pursuer nation and the pursued.
So it is. You will inflict pain on us,
And we on you—unforgettable shame.
So it is. You will number our wounds
But their rottenness will be yours. . . .
With persecution you will renew our youth
And the persecution will bring the age-old
horror on you.
These thoughts were the thoughts of all Israel then.
Shlonsky suddenly dropped his boar-like roar of intoxication and was sober as he stood up. He lifted his hands over all of us. He said: “We have met here as poets and writers, musicians and painters.” He turned to me and concluded, “Those in England with whom we share one profession should know that we have no existence without Palestine, we cannot write or make without Palestine.”
That is their message. Only it withholds a part of the truth, the part that would tell of their courage in persistently creating while they fight, and fighting while they create, and of the victories they win for beauty even while they are defeated. They breathe the wind of freedom in their nostrils; on the mountains of Gilboa the light comes up fresh; and “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”
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“Tel Aviv has been all comfort to me,” I thought, walking through the dark streets after the reception. “And in resigning my job for the sake of Tel Aviv, I have in fact resigned its comforts—have ordered, as it were, my exile from it.
“Perhaps all the rest of my life I shall long to be here again. To have these manifold delights again.
“Just because I loved it I had to give it up. Love has no meaning if you are not prepared to sacrifice so that the loved object may continue to exist.
“And the paradox wreathes into further complications, since I had to give up my love for the sake of another love, love for my own people. And this prior love, too, I could only show through criticism instead of embrace.”
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