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Title: The Twilight Comes Early Author: Murray Bookchin Date: November 2004 Language: en Topics: time, seasons Source: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/twilight.html
The twilight comes early, as it should in the autumn of the seasons and
in the autumn of life. Every part of my body announces the eternity that
must soon follow — the growing pain that fatal diseases colonize my
body, the failure of my organs, the loss of energy, the desire for
death. Even society seems to be dying, to desert me, to bid its
farewell. To those who are near to death, this is as it should be. To
those who are still young, I feel nothing but sorrow. How sad that my
children should be faced with a full lifetime of sterility and fear.
Three days have passed since Bush was reelected. History threatens to
roll back an epoch! What held my life together was socialism. Whether a
society will ever appear that is based on community, care, and
solidarity; whether above all it will be based on reason, I do not know.
Reason has always guided my beliefs, often my actions; now my ardor
dims, however much my convictions are as strong as ever.
This has been the guiding — and painful — light of my life. Socialism is
the star by which I navigated my thoughts, however much it has failed me
and eluded my hopes. To know me is to know my rational ideas, not to
know the chronology of biological events — to ready my “book” of life.
These rational ideas, each ordered dialectically into actualities as
distinguished from realities, form the core of my very being. All else
counts for foibles, disorderly discontinuities, often mere events. It is
from this legacy of freedom that my own sense of continuity formed the
double helix of my thoughts, interacting with a legacy of domination —
each intertwining with the other. Taken together, it was the ribcage of
my being, one depositing itself in the other legacy, exhausting itself
in the other, until freedom reached its fullest (if unknowable) extent
that was possible for its time and place.
I don’t know if there is an “end of history” — which is to say that I
don’t know if there ever can be one. Reason impels me to believe that
there never can be. But I don’t have to believe that there must be. What
should happened is that the legacy of freedom — personal as well as
social — should slowly expand to a point where, through its interaction,
it will absorb the legacy of domination. The two will finally become one
in the sense that domination will have become meaningless. It will have
become too irrational to lay any claim against freedom.
But this, I recognize, is the romantic that dwells in me as my principle
of hope. Just as economics should become an ethics in a rational society
(which is the society I wanted to see come into existence), so I give to
the romantic an abiding place in human affairs. To live without a social
romance is to see without color. Imagine what life would be like in
black and white, without being able to hear — to be deaf to music. Step
by step our potentialities like hearing became organized sound, and the
Marseillaise was born.