al lui Mark Twain. Am descoperit de curand cartea on-line (pornind de la un fragment dintr-o editie in limba romana) si am citit-o pe nerasuflate. poate ca nu e cea mai valoroasa opera a lui Twain, insa randurile ei cuprind atata resemnare si tristete, incat iti spui ca numai un om greu incercat ar fi putut sa le scrie. iar randurile astea vin de la unul din cei mai indragiti umoristi din toata literatura...
ororile vietii sunt descrise cu o naturalete si nevinovatie care imi amintesc de Candide sau de Thyl Ulenspiegel. insa, spre deosebire de Voltaire sau de De Coster, Twain emite fara ocolisuri sau menajamente o serie de consideratii filosofice acuzatoare si pesimiste la adresa umanitatii. citez:
"No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it," and he went on talking like that." It is like your paltry race - always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone posses them. No brute ever does a cruel thing - that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense.
Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?
Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them - and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution - these can lift at a colossal humbug - push it a little - weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Life itself is only a vision, a dream... Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
sursa: http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Twain/Mysterious-Stranger.htm
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