But for him the garlands have faded, and he believes himself to
have failed. He hears no more either the applause or the silent tremor
of the heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere artist
which he would prefer, whether that his work should perish and his
memory survive, or that his work should survive and his memory perish,
and you will see what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a
man does not work merely in order to live and carry on, he works in
order to survive. To work for the work's sake is not work but play. And
play? We will talk about that later on.
A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued, if
it is possible, from the oblivion which overtakes others. From it
springs envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the
crime with which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his brother
Cain. It was not a struggle for bread--it was a struggle to survive in
God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than
hunger, for it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life,
the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would be turned into a
hell by the emergence in a more violent form of the struggle for
survival.
For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not only life but
happiness--life as a matter of course. "Let me die, but let my fame
live!" exclaimed Rodrigo Arias in _Las Mocedades del Cid_ when he fell
mortally wounded by Don Ordonez de Lara.
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