While it is day we will remain
with head high and everything
that we can do we will not leave
before we have done it.
– W. Goethe
We heat our pen in the volcanic fire of our negating spirit. We dip it in our vigorous heart, full of rebellious blood. And in the atheistic light of our mind, we write and write…
So we write, quickly, without literary pursuits, without repugnant theoretical ideologies, without bigoted and sentimental mush from hysterics and political hacks, wrapped only in the cloak of our raging passions.
We write only words of blood, fire and light.
My rough, fiery, energetic pen creaks and scrapes over the white purity of this page, like a viper’s tongue over the tender throat of an innocent baby, giving it death, through poison.
Away, away from me, all ideologies, theosophies, dogmatic and political philosophies; far from me, all pre-established systems: everything has fallen and burned to ashes in the corroding flame of my negating spirit.
I am the complete nihilist, the radical atheist.
I did not just now find out, I did not just now discover and come to know that the one and only most beautiful framework within which proud human Individuality stands out free, solemn and magnificent is the Nothing, the true Nothing!
No foul prison could ever hold this rebellious, iconoclastic spirit of mine; now less than ever!
Now that the enormous trumpet of time has sounded – and indeed it has sounded strong blasts to break the hardest neck of the idiotic rabble – the bold phalanges of black flame must furiously spring forth from the Nothing. In the passionate violence of spontaneous revolt, this flame will form the crackling pillar of fire which goes before the people, giving the first warning of final destruction. This is the hour of feverish bitterness, of terrible anguish!
This is the hour that comes before the divine hour of imminent tragedy, which will give us heroic Death and heroic Greatness.
Oh delightful hour that gives me all the feverish intensity of spirit, I love you!
I would not give up all the bitterness that you bring me for all the mediocre sweetness in the world. I would not give up the fevers that hammer my temple, that burn my temples, that burn my forehead for the tranquility and peace of all the cowardly men.
Oh, Satan, inspire me! Inspire me, oh my divine brother!
Give me the hellish potential to set fire to all those virgin spirits that have not yet been buried in the dung heap of deceitful theories; make it possible for me to draw a daring handful of lovers of heroic, libertarian Greatness and Heroic Death to close to me.
But they will be there! They must be there! May the temperate souls remain calmly rotting away in the company of their stupid saints and senile, old good god.
But we will march! The time has come for all those who, by dominating the ideal, have become its symbol and embodiment to march.
Wrapped in the divinity of our torment, we will go forward and, through the example of our deeds, we will show people which paths lead to new light. Will we fall? It doesn’t matter! We want liberation from the stupid life of humility, slavery, servility, where man must walk on his knees and the spirit must speak in a subdued, low voice, like a prayer.
It is necessary to kill christian philosophy in the most radical sense of the word. The more it goes slinking into democratic civilization (this most cynically ferocious form of christian corruption), the more it becomes the categorical negation of human Individuality.
Democracy! Now we know that it means all this. Oscar Wilde said that democracy is “the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people”.
The hour for rising up against all this has sounded and not just with some disagreeable and repugnant theoretical sheep’s bleating.
Something else entirely is wanted in this bloody twilight of a civilization whose time is over! Either Death or a new Dawn where Individuality lives above every thing.
I have forgotten everything, or rather, not forgotten, but gone beyond (and I know with how much torment), even the unsurpassable love for my Mate and the adoration for my child.
My books – my dear books that I loved above all else – now rest far away from me, there in the old house, in a large chest of drawers, maybe covered in dust, maybe bathed with the tears of my dear Mate.
But even my love for you, my dear books, luminous torch of my thoughts, is overcome!
Today, I feel something inside me, stronger than any love, something that kisses my mind with all the heat of an irresistible charm…
On the ruins of all this that I destroyed through negation, a new faith is reborn. Faith in the impossible mad possible by my negation, or the final purification, how very real, that is met among the ardent flames of the final, tragic and redemptive catastrophe.
Today, I seek a single hour of raging anarchy, and I will give all my dreams, all my loves, all my life, for that hour.
But that hour will come! Oh, when will it come! And if it should not come, I would willingly give myself over to the human-eating hands of the idiotic and brutal society that has already given me a magnificent death sentence (for recalling that I possess higher ideas that have the value of pointing out that the divine freedom of the I is something more beautiful and greater than its brutal war), and I would cynically make them shoot me as a sign of the deepest contempt for myself and the unmentionable cowardice of every human being.
Greeting the revived Libertario and the next social insurrection, I fraternally clasp the hands of true rebels of all the various tendencies!
Today is the eve of Action! At the first spark I will be among you.
Il Libertario, volume XVIII #721, La Spezia, February 27, 1919