Playwrights often overdo the clever line or turn as the curtain’s about to fall. It shows lack of taste. You don’t find it in good plays.
The strange thing is that when people come together in a community for the purpose, simply, of production, or for reasons of geography, they start to hate each other and do one another down. Because each one only loves himself. Community is an illusion, as a result of which sooner or later there will rise over the continents evil, deadly, mushroom clouds.
An agglomeration of people aiming at one thing – filling their stomachs - is doomed to destruction, decay, hostility.
‘Not by bread alone.’
Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable of directing history, or else he does direct it, but only by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is. There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism—naked and cynical—is going to complete the destruction.
Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion.
Mankind has hurried to protect the body (perhaps on the strength of that natural and unconscious gesture which served as the beginning of what is called progress) and has given no thought to protecting the soul.
The church (as opposed to religion) has not been able to do so. In the course of the history of civilization the spiritual half of man has been separated further and further from the animal, the material, and now in an infinite expanse of darkness we can just make out, like the lights of a departing train, the other half of our being as it rushes away, irrevocably and for ever.
Spirit and flesh, feeling and reason can never again be made one. It’s too late. For the moment we are crippled by the appalling disease of spiritual deficiency; and the disease is fatal. Mankind has done everything possible to annihilate itself, starting with its own moral annihilation-—physical death is merely the result.
How insignificant, pitiful and vulnerable people are when they think about ‘bread’ and only about ‘bread’, and don’t realize that thinking like that can only lead to death. The one achievement of human reason is its recognition of the dialectical principle. And if only man were consistent, and not suicidal, he would understand so much by being guided by that principle.
Everyone can be saved only if each saves himself.
The time has come for individual prowess. The banquet during the plague. You can only save everyone else by saving yourself: in a spiritual sense, of course. Concerted efforts are useless. As people we all lack the instinct for the preservation of the species that ants and bees possess. On the other hand, we have immortal souls, which humanity has spat on with vicious delight. Instinct cannot save us; the lack of it will be our downfall. And we don’t give a rap for our spiritual, moral foundations. So where does salvation lie? No good turning to our leaders, that’s for sure.
Now only a genius can save humanity - not a prophet, no! – a genius who will formulate a new moral ideal. But where is he, this Messiah? There is nothing left for us but to learn to die with dignity. Cynicism has never saved anyone yet; it’s the lot of the faint-hearted.
Human history looks all too like some monstrous experiment with people, set up by a cruel being incapable of pity. A kind of vivisection. And will it ever be explained? Surely human fate cannot just be the cycle of an endless process, the point of which people are not able to understand? The thought is terrifying. After all, despite everything, despite the cynicism and the materialism, man does believe in the Infinite, in Immortality. If you were to tell him that not one more person was to be born into the world, he’d put a bullet through his brain.
It has been drummed into man that he’s mortal, but faced with something that really threatens to take away his right to Immortality he will resist as if he were about to be killed.
Man has simply been corrupted. Or rather, little by little people have corrupted each other. And all through the centuries, right up to the present day, those who thought about the soul have been - and still are being—physically eliminated.
The one thing that might save us is a new heresy that could topple all the ideological institutions of our wretched, barbaric world.
The greatness of modern man lies in protest.
Thank God for people who burn themselves alive in front of an impassive, wordless crowd, or who walk out into squares with placards and slogans condemning themselves to reprisals, and all those who say ‘No’ to the go-getters and the godless.
To rise above the opportunity of living, to acknowledge practically the mortality of our flesh in the name of the future, in the name of Immortality…
If humanity is still capable of that, then all is not lost. There is still a chance.
Humanity has suffered too much, and man’s sense of suffering has atrophied. That is dangerous; because it means that it is no longer possible now to save humanity by means of blood and suffering.
God, what a time to be alive!
The Diaries of Andrei Tarkovsky: 7th September 1970.
