I imagine how uncomfortable these people would feel if in the presence of some of our own, clever professionals, whose essential purpose was to seal profitable business deals and weren’t even close to interested in the delicacy of manners or subtlety of style and expression. They would be completely consternated from the very first second. They would conclude that they had to do with boorish, primitive people. And they’d be right. On the contrary, they might have been able to communicate with a “good” man of our time for a couple of minutes. And I’m saying a couple of minutes because after a while, our “good” men would get bored, think there was nothing to be gained from that conversation and get up and leave since even I was tempted to take advantage of their naivety and gullibility in the beginning.
Now you can see that men and women cannot tolerate even the slightest “politics” and expedience in their social interactions even when it comes to a handshake. Any calculating behaviour—if, of course, it comes to their attention—causes adverse reactions. These people do art for art’s sake and never for profit, otherwise it stops being art. They make friendships for friendship’s sake and for the spiritual nourishment it offers, away from utilitarian objectives.
THEIR RENAISSANCE AND HUMAN EVOLUTION BEFORE THE FIRST NIBELVIRCH
9-XII Again(Late at night)
As far as their inner cultivation is concerned, Stefan had told me a while ago, “Our teachers have their ways. For each of those children there comes a time, even before they enter their adolescence, when they feel such an attraction to our culture that, learning about it in school and gradually coming to a deeper understanding of it, makes the voices of the generation of 876
As I learnt, a hundred and ten years before the first
One night, I searched in the
Sometimes, the information I have to process is so much that I get lost and confused. I go back and forth from subject to subject that I often forget to mention the most important parts. I’m really trying to record as much as I can and in the most precise way possible, but I don’t always succeed.
Now I remembered something else, a bit irrelevant: the first one to foresee the evolution of mankind was an ordinary biologist of the Valley named Jansen, who at the time wasn’t among the best in his field but got luckier than his teachers. After centuries of life in this vast spiritual capital and drawn out initiation of several generations into long-term self-cultivation that had refined the psyche of the people and had transformed them into more sophisticated human beings—and everyone here verifies that no interventions were ever made on infants by the biological institutes of the Valley—he, Jansen, was the first who, with great confidence, announced from his lab to the whole world that he had proof that supported that there had been tiny but extremely significant anatomical changes in the most delicate and important neurons of the brain, changes that were directly connected to the quality of spiritual life of the residents of the Valley. Everyone agreed on their existence, but they had never managed to prove if those changes were indeed a result of the quality of the spiritual life or vice versa.