The Morning of the Magicians [antikvár]

1 IPREFACE;>Physically I am a clumsy person and I deplore the fact. I | think I would be a happier man if I had worker's hands hands capable of making useful things, of plunging into the depths of nature to tap sources of goodness and peace. My adopted father (I always refer to him as my father because it was he who brought me up) was a journeyman tailor. He was great-hearted and possessed a truly questing mind. He used to say, with a smile, that betrayal by the intellectuals began with the first artist who depicted a winged angelit is by our hands that we attain heaven!In spite of my lack of manual dexterity I did once manage to bind a book. I was sixteen at the time, a student at a vocational class in a suburb of Juvisy. On Saturday afternoons we had the choice between wood and metal work, modeling, and book binding. Poetry was then my favorite reading, Rimbaud my favorite poet. And yetafter an inner struggle, I admitI abandoned the idea of binding his Une Saison en Enfer. My father possessed some thirty books ranged in a narrow cupboard in his workroom along with bobbins, chalk, shoulder pads and patterns. There were also, in this cupboard, thousands of notes which he had jotted down in his scholar's hand at a corner of his bench during innumerable nights working at his trade. Among these books I had read Flammarion's Le Monde avant la Création de l'Homme (The World Before the Creation of Man) and was just discovering Walter Rathenau's Ou va la Monde? (Where is the World Going?). I set out to bind Rathenau's book, not without difficulty. Rathenau was among the first victims of the Nazis, and the year was 1936. So, each Saturday, I struggled over my task in the little workshop of the vocational school, and on the first of May I presented my father with the finished book, and a spray of lilies of the valley out of regard for him and the working class.My father had underlined in red pencU in this book a passage I still remember:XV