Your Soul Dies

Your soul dies in Europe, whether you will it or not. That ardent soul which drove you to reach this continent was nothing but the bait of the great trap you set with your own two hands, to assassinate your soul with your dreams.

This is Europe: if you revile it, it reviles you; and if it reviles you, you cannot revile it back. Europe is the stifled desire of the East, the beautiful dream that slaughters you slowly, like the sweetness of the soul as it runs out under a cold knife. The pain that stays eternal in the details of your soul after that slaughter cannot be forgotten.

Europe is loss unto loss. Either you become one of them entirely, as the popular proverb says — "He who keeps company with a people for forty days becomes one of them" — or you depart from them altogether. But somehow we have become one of them and departed from them at the very same time.

We have become one of them in our way of thinking, to the point that we think of dating that girl and fathering an illegitimate son by her, while we live a sickly isolation in our hearts. That isolation kills the soul, kills the self, and scatters our life among cold walls and daily papers that flood us with mail in a distant north. This is you, the good citizen of Europe, who feels he is merely a number among numbers that never end.

Europe kills your soul slowly. Never think that the difficulty lay in reaching Europe; the truth is that the real difficulty lies in leaving it. That leaving which costs you effort, money, and weariness, and breeds in you a buried rancour. That rancour drives you to cling to what you have, even if the price is your soul.

But as my father said in his last words: "O God, burn Europe."