The Surgeon Pushed Away

Why have Nietzsche, Montaigne, Proust and Kafka, survived overhead the enlightenment soggy bottoms? Because they stayed to us, they didn’t run away.
   When I think of the world, when the measures of man have fled my malice, the image of a Stoic sculptor comes to mind; he observes, looks the world round from a peak, in a circle of stone, and he turns to his charter, his slab of marble, and puts his hand on it, and quietly moves away to his stubborn tastes and cares; taste in Plato’s dialogue On the Soul, and the sculptor more interested in his ships, never so popular to be charter parties, Optimates vessels through and through and through, to the guts after checked and the birds already beginning to sing, the place Utica and the surgeon pushed away.

Anatol Cordua © 2017