stupider than birds

i am turning toward a kind of aesthetic mysticism…. when there is no encouragement to be derived from one’s fellows, when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. if society continues on its present path i believe we shall see the return of such mystics as have existed in all the dark ages of the world. the soul, unable to overflow, will be concentrated in itself. the time is not far off when we shall see the return of world-sicknesses – beliefs in the last day, expectation of a messiah, etc. but all this enthusiasm will be ignorant of its own nature, and, the age being what it is, can have no theological foundation: what will be its basis? some will seek it in the flesh, others in the ancient religions, others in art; humanity, like the jewish tribes in the desert, will adore all kinds of idols. we were born a little too early: in twenty-five years the points of intersection of these quests will provide superb subjects for masters. then prose (prose especially, the youngest form) will be able to play a magnificent humanitarian symphony. books like the satyricon and the golden ass will be written once more, containing on the intellectual plane all the lush excesses which those books have on the sensual. that is what all the socialists in the world have not been willing to see, with their eternal materialistic preachings. they have denied pain, they have blasphemed three-quarters of modern poetry, the blood of technology that quickens within us. if the feeling of human insufficiency, of the nothingness of life, were to perish (the logical consequence of their hypothesis), we should be more stupid than the birds… perhaps beauty will become a feeling useless to humanity, and art something half-way between algebra and music