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martes, 8 de enero de 2019

Solzhenitsyn's "Golden Matrix" speech, delivered in Zurich on 31 May 1974


BRAND-NEW TRANSLATION: SOLZHENITSYN'S "GOLDEN MATRIX" SPEECH


National Review website has just published a brand-new translation of Solzhenitsyn's "Golden Matrix" speech, delivered in Zurich on 31 May 1974 in accepting the Italian journalists’ “Golden Matrix” prize. 

This thoughtful speech, prefiguring many of the key themes of the Harvard Address, has never before appeared in English. 

Happy reading! (Bonus: see short clip below of the prize ceremony from that day.) 

https://youtu.be/VcFY_B_fL98 



Excerpt:

"... the main danger is not that the world is split apart into two alternative social systems, but that both systems are struck by malady, in fact a common malady, and thus neither of the systems, with their current worldview, augurs a healthy outcome. This malady has evolved organically over several centuries, through all the happenstance of developments in individual countries, and entered the very fabric of modern humanity. And if we take a distant vantage point, we can trace its path. We — all of us, all of civilized humanity — have been seated and fastened onto a single, rigidly interconnected carousel, and have taken a long orbital journey. Like little kids mounted on the carousel’s horses, we thought this journey would be endless, always forward, only forward, never sideways or askew. This orbital journey has been — the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, bloody physical revolutions, democratic societies, socialist projects. This journey had to occur because the Middle Ages failed, in their time, to hold humanity’s course; because the planting on Earth of the Kingdom of God was forcibly imposed, with essential personal rights being revoked in favor of the Whole. We were violently pulled, forced toward the spiritual, and so we tore away and dove — headlong and unbounded — into the Material. Thus began a long era of humanistic individualism, the construction of a civilization based on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all."

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