Page:Plunder (Perlman).djvu/20

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14

strange--I feel as if the flesh were loosening from my bones, like a leper's.

LIGHTS OUT

BRUNO

What? The prosecutor cannot bear the crime through the criminal's eyes?
Masters, do not forget yourselves! You're in a court and not a steam bath.
Remember the marble walls, the steel beams and the rose.
What can this Moksa be to you?
To think of you making bowls in distant India!
Ludicrous vision!
What does this Moksa represent but the dark, the superstitious, the backward?
What but the savagery, the famines and the plagues from which your brave ancestors emerged
In what you call your Renaissance?
This Moksa speaks of work as if it were itself an end,
He calls work Self-Expression, an extension of his soul.
What Mysticism! What Puritanism! What Impudence!
How quickly he displays his tendencies!
You bring him freedom from these primitive demands: this enslavement to hand labor, this pointless search to see himself in his work.
Work as a goal? Bosh!
It's been your destiny to free men from this crude distortion.
Work is but a means to comfort, security.
Work is a hardship to be endured for its rewards.
Self-expression! Ah how the backward rationalize necessities!
What is the point of self-expression when you can have a task, a role, a function?
What point in understanding the universe when you can extend your physical being over it?
Work is a commodity, an asset in the acquisition of capital.