The Early Days of a Better Nation

Tuesday, March 30, 2004


Nothing is ever lost

The materialist doctrine that reassures us we must die also reminds us, with its same conservation laws, that nothing is ever lost. And even a weekend in Barcelona, that city of culture and graffiti, of high art and scrawled initials, of union offices and unpredictable demonstrations, irresistibly and however incongruously calls to mind this passage, once a talisman of revolutionaries, from Birth of our Power by Victor Serge:
Nothing is ever lost [...] This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps by having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.

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