How could someone think that he had to make belated “excuses” – or even merely express “regrets” – for the passionate groping path, for the fever that had been?
For desiring only the fiery beauties and comradeships never dared – with a frightening lack of concern (never found again) on all sides in the face of all powers?
It is definitely necessary to pay for guilelessness of this caliber. We have seen reason.
But once they were dreamed, could beauties, comradeships, expenditures without calculation ever cease to be – even if we ignored the entire world in which they demanded to have a value?
Besides, how could it have gone differently with regard to knowledge and action, considering what we were in that historical instant and in that moment of our life?
A force drew us, blind as life, without fear or remorse: a possibility, a happiness, an innocence, a festival.
That loss would be expiated through leaps of this kind: and how thoughtless, empty, out of place it would be!
What we wanted so intensely, others will “want” with the same boundless passion, without having “chosen” it first. The world will be young and beautiful once again, each time authentic life abandons its old skin at the winter’s end.
This is not a prophecy. Just a statement of fact.
How could anyone go to meet such an unknown, if not with a blindfold over his eyes?
If “everyone is a Child of his times”, what sense is there at this point in “repenting” in the face of absolutely destined passions? And how do we abandon ourselves to repentance, when, contrarily, in these transits we stored up a stock of cloudless joy for so much time? – of fierceness, honor, pride, guilelessness, beauty, courage?
Should we excuse ourselves for having been happy, innocent, mad and beautiful?
Another problem is really knowing how much of our “knowledge”, our words and even our actions we had “chosen”: above all, it was an uncontainable, very youthful, vital thrust!
Presuming that then we had not recognized the fantasies that carried us away as fictions – powerful, outdated illuminations. Again: fated –, what sense would there be in not recognizing these illuminations as such? So that we can be pitifully cross with the boundless drunkenness generated by those battles?
And how will we be able to speak without sadness of any new acquisition of “knowledge”, if we had to barter for it with so much lost joy?
—Meager profit, great loss.
Not that we wouldn’t like to think of ourselves as old children.
“A form of life was experienced.” Everyone became someone else.
But at least don’t let our new life pass at the expense of slander against what we were in other times.
An injustice of this sort about the past would leave questionable contributions of expectations for future young lives.
We would teach them resignation – the worst defeat of all.
Do what you will, we will not excuse ourselves.
(from Machete, italian anarchist magazine) 2009