Various

“ Preparedness, therefore, will only add to the power of the privileged few and help them to subdue, to enslave, and crush labor. Surely Gompers must know that, and if he joins the howl of the military clique he must stand condemned as a traitor to the cause of labor.
It will be with preparedness as it has been with all the other institutions in our confused life which were created for the good of the people and which have accomplished the very reverse. Supposedly, America is to prepare for peace; but in reality it will prepare for the cause of war. ”

“ It has always been so and it will continue to be so until nation refuses to fight against nation, and until the people of the world stop preparing for slaughter. Preparedness is like the seed of a poisonous plant; placed in the soil, it will bear poisonous fruit. The European mass destruction is the fruit of that poisonous seed. It is imperative that the American workers realize this before they are driven by the jingoes into the madness that is forever haunted by the spectre of danger and invasion ”

“ Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue. Even in times of peace almost nothing is spent on education, art, literature, and science in comparison with the amount devoted to militarism; while in times of war everything else is set at naught: all life stagnates, all effort is curtailed, the very sweat and blood of the masses are used to feed this insatiable monster—militarism. ”

“ It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities. Those who appreciate the urgent need of cooperating in great struggles must oppose military preparedness imposed by the state and capitalism for the destruction of the masses. They must organize the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state. Industrial and economic preparedness is what the workers need. That alone leads to revolution at the bottom as against mass destruction from on top. ”

“ Przybyszewski, like Nietzsche, like Wilde, is a unique mosaique, in which the personality, the artist, his life and his works, are inseparable, indivisible units of the wonderful whole. Who can fathom this hellish cosmos, this mare tenebrarum of the modern man’s soul, which the mad Pole has traversed and penetrated to the bottom, and has cast out shrieking monsters and gargoyles illuminated with blinding, dazzling, infernal flames? ”

“ Falk is going to pieces, Falk the immutable, the all knowing, the transcender, the ... the ... the ... the Homo Sapiens. What is the matter? When he betrays a woman and causes her death a hideous vapor suddenly envelopes his soul and befouls it. Przybyszewski thrusts his radiant leer from behind Zarathustra’s mask and hisses, “Conscience, ha!”
And thus it goes its merry way. To the edge of the precipice this mad Pole pushes his whirling Falk, to the utter edge of known reason, known psychology and known Passions. ”

“ This curiosity of the artist brooks no bounds, short of the facts against which it brings up abruptly. And so Przybyszewski for all his uncanny subtlety cannot be accused of morbidity since he uses it not to distort but merely to reveal the truth. If he has no false reverence neither has he irreverence. His scalpel, always flashing and leaping, pauses a moment on a state of emotion and, pointing, calls it by name. “For I am I,” says Falk. “I am a criminal diabolic nature.” Or again:
“And so a certain man is suffering from love induced by auto-suggestion. ”

“ Take away from Przybyszewski his ecstacy of pain, and you rob him of his very essence, of his raison d’être, of his creative breath. When you read his Poems in Prose you face a soul writhing in hopeless despair, in futile longing, in maddening convulsions. But you cannot pity the artist. You are aware of the sublime joy in his sorrow, of the unearthly bliss that is wrapped in the black wings of his melancholy. In his poem At the Sea, the elemental yearning of his soul reaches cosmic dimensions. ”

“ The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but the America of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives. And it is no less pathetic that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but is indeed the road to universal slaughter. ”

“ But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munition and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussianism, the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, will build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be; because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed as in America, and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital. ”

“ In the face of this approaching disaster it behooves men and women not yet overcome by the war madness to raise their protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated upon them.
America is essentially the melting pot. No national unit composing it is in a position to boast of superior race purity, particular historic mission, or higher culture. Yet the jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, “America for Americans,” “America first, last, and all the time.” ”

“ Americanization societies with well-known liberals as members, they who but yesterday decried the patriotic clap-trap of today, are now lending themselves to the befogging of the minds of the people, to the building-up of the same destructive institutions in America which they are directly and indirectly helping to pull down in Germany—militarism, the destroyer of youth, the raper of woman, the annihilator of the best in the race, the very mower of life. ”

“ I have a feeling that the walls of our house told me the story of the whipping. I could never live in the house afterwards and came away at once to this room where I am now and where my sister comes to visit me.
And so there is my sister in my room and we are embarrassed. I do not look at her but turn my back and begin writing furiously. Presently she is on the arm of my chair with her arm about my neck.
I am the world and my sister is the young artist in the world. I am afraid the world will destroy her. So furious is my love of her that the touch of her hand makes me tremble. ”

“ This book is the epic of consciousness. “The thing must be thought out,” says Falk. And nuance by nuance it is thought out, rapidly but faithfully, under your very eyes. You are invited,—no, compelled,—to take part in the operation. Hence your feeling of fatigue. And again, after a page or two, “He examined his own feelings.”
“But why a Falk?” the Philistine demands. “Falk is no average man. He is a genius, and as such his psychology is specialized and distinct. Falk is a neurasthenic, victim of erotomania. Even his lucidity is not to his credit. ”

“ That Falk loved two women, or ten women, is not only possible, but probably inevitable. What in the average man is a temperate reaching out for a few specific joys becomes in a Falk the impulse of his whole being for self-expression. It bursts out along a thousand channels, requiring as many outward aspects as there are sources in his personality. And it is this devious stream of a human consciousness that we are following outward to its expression in words or acts, and backward to its source, as we dissect with Przybyszewski Falk’s mental protoplasm. ”

“ Neither the exoticism of Ysa, nor the pillow-serviceability of Yanina, nor the medieval fanaticism of Marit, nor Olga’s revolutionary resignedness, have the power of checking the hurricane of his questing spirit for more than a moment, such moments when the tormented man erects for his consolation a phantom, be it a superman or a Christ. Falk’s quest for self-forgetfulness is futile. He lacks the healthy capacity of us, normal beings, for finding salvation in befogging our vision. ”

“ To uphold the institutions of our country—that is it; the institutions which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as well as of the foreigner and turn it into wealth and power; the institutions which rob the alien of whatever originality he brings with him and in return give him cheap Americanism, whose glory consists in mediocrity and arrogance. ”

“ Do they in America? No! Do they in England, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, or Austria select these teachers from mediocrities who will be sure not to revolt against the incompetent decisions of a layman board of trustees? They don’t!
Do they in America? They do!
What is “city beautiful” in Europe? It is a fact! What is it in America? It is a “slogan.”
No, gentlemen, you need not be worried about European Art! War is not inartistic. Money is! A general staff in war time can destroy what art has created! Our system of millionaire trustees is preventing Art from creating! ”

“ All the concealing layers of evasions and of equivocations have been dissected away; there lies spread out before you sections of naked consciousness. And so subtle has been the dissecting work that there has been no disarrangement and no death. All is still living, still functioning. And your sensation of strangeness, almost of horror, is born out of revulsion against a self-consciousness so intense as to seem almost morbid. ”

“ In order to maintain America military preparedness must be engaged in at once. A billion dollars of the people’s sweat and blood is to be expended for dreadnaughts and submarines for the army and the navy, all to protect this precious America. ”

“ Like a plague the mad spirit of militarism is sweeping the country, infesting the clearest heads and staunchest hearts. National security leagues, with cannon as their emblem of protection, naval leagues with women in their lead, have sprung up all through the United States. ”

“ It is then a little that I begin to understand my sister. She is the artist right to adventure in the world, to be destroyed in the adventure, if that be necessary, and I, on my couch, am the worker in the world, blinking up at the stars that can be seen from my window when my couch is properly arranged. ”

“ Had not his Falk, his homo sapiens, been crushed in his struggle to attain liberation and supermanship? Recall Falk’s self-rending meditations: “Conscience! Heh-heh-heh! Conscience! How ridiculously silly is your superman! Herr Professor Nietzsche left out of account tradition and culture which created conscience in the course of hundreds of centuries.... Oh, how ridiculous is your superman sans conscience!” ”

“ A thousand times has the world transfigured since Thy look consumed the tarnishing glitter of my soul, and yet I see Thy little child-like face and the golden crown of hair over Thy brow, see how two tears had spread into a pale smile that glowed on Thy mouth, and hear the dark plaint of Thy voice. ”

“ The American military ring with its Roosevelts, its Garrisons, its Daniels, and lastly its Wilsons, is moving the very heavens to place the militaristic heel upon the necks of the American people—using the same methods of the German diplomats to saddle the masses with Prussian militarism. ”

“ Eric Falk is not a nuance. He is the whole of Stanislaw Przybyszewski, the whole of modern wisdom and introspection, which is another word for degeneracy.
Come now, pretend I am not reviewing it. Pretend I am something of a clairvoyant.
See Przybyszewski creating him—Erick Falk. He is sitting at his desk. He is going to write a book about man, not a type, not a silhouette, but about Man complete. He wants the final man of his day, the Homo Sapiens, the Zarathustran phantom.
This Przybyszewski is a thorough fellow, a biologist, a poet, a physician, an historian, a psychologist. ”

“ Preparedness is directed not only against the external enemy; it aims much more at the internal enemy. It is directed against that element of labor which has learned not to hope for anything from our institutions, that awakened part of the working people who have realized that the war of the classes underlies all wars among nations, and that if war is justified at all it is the war against economic dependence and political slavery, the two dominant issues involved in the struggle of the classes. ”

“ Chopin’s longing, as reflected in Przybyszewski, is tinted with the pale color of anemia peculiar to a representative of a degenerate aristocracy (the Poet’s progenitor died of delirium tremens) , with his transparent skin projecting the tiniest veins, with his slender figure and prolongated limbs that breathe with each movement incomparable gracefulness, with his overdeveloped intellect which shines in his eyes, as in the eyes of frail children who are doomed to early death. ”