Introduction

Responsibility

”We did not pass all those centuries, castes, heroisms and fairytales to rest on this land today. If we are taking a break, it is to prepare for a tenfold swing.” This is how Walt Whitman encouraged Emerson in 1856, calling him teacher. Are there any teachers today to convincingly show us that Man under heavens has a role, meaning and measure much bigger than the ideology of an intestine, above survival and raging? Or will the blindness of obscene egotism, in its epochal triumph, swallow us so hard that we will not notice that we are leaving our descendants debt bondage, ecological catastrophes, ethical self-cancelation? ”Those living day to day just have to be a bit more patient.” How long shall we live?
We have the new edition of National Review before us. It is not a teacher but can be a road towards it. We are taking you to Devica mountain, to Vrdnik, Armenia. We are going through old travelogues. We are telling about people who, in difficult times, did not say: ”I cannot, I give up. I’m leaving.”