Rafael Barret "The Fellow Man"

                                        The Fellow Man.

Without the fellow man, we wouldn’t realize of just how deep is our loneliness.

The nature gives us more intimate company than our brothers; is more pious with our illusions. She lets us talk alone and, sometimes, returns us the desired echo of our wailings. Maybe because of being so far from us in the crowd of her strange forms, maybe for being between us and her an immense emptiness, manage our fragile dreams to sustain above the serene abyss and can our shadow enlengthen unimpeded. Thus God accompanied the fathers of the wilderness, and to Robinson in his island, and rested the genius on the bard of Guernesey. But the men clog each other. They are too similar, contiguous notes that dissonate. The society overwhelms the harmony in the germ. Each one feels himself buried alive by his fellow human.


The theory of Pythagoras, for the geometric souls, is a social link. They imagine communicating with Mars one night, lighting over some sahar plain the lines of the classic figure. It’s not the hard thing to communicate with Mars, but with the neighbour. Remains the word, the poor words hackneyed by all the centuries, prostituted to all the uses, the words dulled and withered, that anyone understands and are of no one. They serve the patched souls, that because they rumble they figure they exist. Existing is a secret. To think is to gag oneself. ¿How are we to communicate what is ours, what distinguishes us? One can’t communicate but what is common.

Incomparable tragedy that of millions of beings thirsty of impossible, condemned between themselves to taper and tear each other without ever possessing one another. Fruits prisoners of a shell hard as diamond and opaque as lead, only by his death opened and broken. It is not, the dagger, enough lock pick for the mysterious door. There is no audacity that takes off the mask from the unknown face: Together they are ripped by the black final swipe that awaits us. If there were no more than fear, rage and hate in the community, there still would be hope of joining us to the neighbour: We would invent love and mercy. And there is no hope: The piety insults; after the delirium that squeezes against our chest flesh warm and adored, we comprehend that the barrier is standing, that has caressed us the sphinx without ceasing to be sphinx, and that the gestures of the passion are gestures of rage. The ray of love illuminates the gap never crossed. Sadness of the futile screams, of the unanswered knocks, of the offerings withered on the threshold of the closed temple.

In the parts of our narrow jail are painted the movement and the life; paths that flee to the endless horizon, and the blue of the seas and of the skies. In the walls of our dungeon is painted the freedom.



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This article makes me think of the Hedgehog's Dilemma, a concept developed by Arthus Schopenhauer, altough there is a little thing that i don't understand from this article; The final paragraph. Ah well, hopefully i will someday. As always, i hope you have enjoyed the article.