38 THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS

ing and humanely chastising "audience that watches, with
malign delight, secure in its own legal innocence.

Yet, if man would be saved he must become pure and
bestial once more. Otherwise, he comes to the end of his story,

If he is to regain health he must feast at another table.
He must strenghten his appetite and purge his diet of the
pity-and-fear sauce. He must shun sympathy and human
warmth. _

Let him take his abasement back to the barren rock,
and let him wear out the rock with watching. Every place
but his rock has lost its meaning. Let him become an outlaw
of the night.

Let him give battle to the Modern Spirit and indict him
for his sly, cheating joke on the fateless ones.

Let him never consent to play a part on his scene.

For, the actor at our confessional invokes himself alone,
speaks for himself alone, and forces himself to act. His final
depraved role 1s that he becomes only an actor of himself,
in obedience to that Divine Malice, the Modern Spirit, whe
officiates at the self-devouring sacrifice of all the brothers.
Feasting alone in tasteless reverie he sings his chorale of
brotherhood and waits for the Titanic drama to end, con-
doning in advance his actors’ most quaint crimes in return
for the amusing show they put on of their mutual exter-
mination through their severally held universal patents of
righteousness.

Thus he squats on Dionysus’ ruined altar. Mutilated
Sileni lie in the dust at his feet, laughing at the sun, and
the hallowed bones of the god’s precinct are bared to the
elements.

Athens, Greece, 1961