The Golden Age Read Online Free PDF

bewildered by their placidity. When their property and lives were in danger this could manifest itself as an almost heroic calm, but at other times it could come across as a dull indolence and want of courage (though the islanders were no cowards). No one could take from them their treasures, which were embedded in the present, and they knew this very well; hence there was nothing for them to fear. The murmurs to which they listened, the tangled shapes whose script they read, these things they could find anywhere; I believe that they even imagined death to be some kind of murmur, and for this reason they had no fear of it. Yet their complaisance made me uncomfortable. One should bear in mind that in the end they triumphed over their conquerors; I believe that they knew from the very beginning of the magnificent victory to come. If their submissiveness was part of a highly successful strategy, I’m not sure this makes their attitude any more estimable or easier to bear.
    As I got to understand the character of the islanders better, I was able to imagine what this secret war must have been like: evidently it was so inconspicuous that for a long time the conquerors had no notion that any kind of struggle was going on, let alone that their inglorious defeat was foretold from the beginning. I see the foreigners as they condescend to describe to the islanders the stories and dogmas of their religion, as they tell them of the latest advances in knowledge in Europe, as they speak of the natural sciences, the laws of mechanics and new teachings in logic and distinct ideas, as they demonstrate to the islanders the machines they use in their building and war-making. I imagine the islanders listening to them, repeating their concepts and theories, reciting their prayers. The foreigners sense that something is happening to their ideas and their faith, that they are undergoing some uncanny transformation, but they have no notion of what this transformation might consist in; after all, all the islanders are doing is repeating their utterances verbatim. As the Europeans see no place at which to strike, as they do not know what to forbid and what to eradicate, what to polemicize about and what to refute, they have no means of self-defence. The natives do not even have a god one could take from them. The islanders always repeat what they are told and are never silent; whenever the Europeans retreat to their patios with their fountains, the voices of the natives, buzzing like insects and repeating the words of the Europeans, seem to reach them through the thick walls.
    When the islanders repeated the theories of the Europeans, they did not change in them a single word or concept; no article of proof was missing, nor were any laws of logic violated. Yet it seemed to the foreigners that in the act of repetition the logic they had used to this point was revealed to be a dreamlike game, its logical structures to be labyrinthine. Although the methodical approach was disturbed in none of its aspects, it was transformed into a ritual that hinted at sorcery. It remained the case that if man is mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates, too, is mortal, but suddenly it seemed that the mechanism that transmits to the conclusion by means of a central article the predicate of the upper premiss, was started up by a unknown force, a force that the Europeans had never before been aware of; now it seemed that behind the figures of their judgments they were seeing the outlines of mechanisms wholly different, driven by this force with the same willingness and perseverance; they also thought they glimpsed the contours of fantastic syllogisms in whose judgments the place of Socrates was taken by scaly, malodorous monsters and in whose conclusions were revealed flashes of venomous light and muted cries which, by some strange irresistible method, flowed out of the colours of sounds and the rhythm of premisses. It would have been bad enough if this transformation