Word: shame
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While the victorious Allies have marked V-E day each year with parades and speeches, the enormity of Germany's guilt and shame has imposed an anguished silence upon that country. Last week, 25 years after the Zusam-menbruch (collapse) of the Third Reich, West Germany's first Social Democrat Chancellor broke with tradition. In a 21-minute speech to the Bundestag, Brandt declared that "no one is free from the history he has inherited...
...rule and passionate love prove irreconcilable, as Charmian's farewell line "Your crown's awry" beautifully explains. Death for both women brings no diminution of majesty but its highest pitch. Cleopatra, like Dido, loves without bound because she is natively glorious. But Cleopatra, who does not share Dido's shame, dies in knowledge of self-redemption. She loves Antony as she loves herself, just as he honors her as he honors himself. All of these destinations may be heard in her greatest speech, "Our lamp is spent...
...self-command which makes possible pure heroic action. The two suicides- as triumphs over Caesar- represent the greatest heroic acts possible in the world. Suicide is the last act to make life comprehensible. It is purified of self-contempt and vain resignation by the capture, through the suffering of shame, of that internal fire which burns the will clear. It is exonerated from the deeper vanity of despair, or storic contemptus mundi, by the perfect fusion of hand and heart. Decretas dispels all ambiguity...
...otherworldly. Neither East nor West is finally rejected, because each is imperfectly noble. East and West reconcile in souls which couch on flowers, in souls which possess the poetic intensity to summon such a vision. The heroiclyric movement of Antony and Cleopatra is from vain love, to shame, to regeneration. This corresponds generally to the threefold mystical way to salvation of purgation, illumination, and union. The even more general movement is from conflict with self, and therefore with God, to mortification, vivification, love...
...feel the extraordinary conclusive beauty of Charmian's farewell to dead Cleopatra, "Ah, Soldier !" Heroic redemption demanded love to be gentle the violence of war, to give action meaning beyond action. Antony and Cleopatra are souls self-consumed and self-created, above the strife of hate and fear and shame, pure in the azure light of a lucid and refulgent sky, open to the sun. They die for love, they die to restore their lost dignity, to attain dignity impossible to other mortals. They die as soldiers and gods and sleepers on flowers...