«Research into the history of our civilization’s sickness has been ongoing for so long that this research itself has turned into a sickness that paralyzes its own aspirations from the very start. The oversaturation of artificial signs has led to a brain poisoning that is difficult to cure — or altogether incurable. The world cannot reconcile all of its forces. Senses have been stunted. The function of language is so exhausted and unreal to the point that it is ceasing to exist. We tend to create new forms whose own tendency is to become anti-forms, because we pay no heed to the forms around us. The long since obsolete school models have defaced what little energy remains. Eastern civilization is experiencing new spiritual and material destruction. Western civilization, so chaotic and so hideously constructed, has made taking away man’s soul its priority. The space between East and West has been drastically narrowed. This space has been reduced not in the sense that they have been drawn closer together, but in the sense of making both unrecognizable. Instead of being seen as sacred soil on which we might reconcile the raging passions of the so-called new civilization, or the still undefined but already cruelly imposed new world order, this space has been treated like a crack that can eventually be filled with Europe’s radioactive waste.
All the continents have been discovered. We must reconcile ourselves with this fact. Even deserted islands cannot enjoy idyllic peace for long, for weary explorers have pushed them into assimilating into our, in any case already ruined, civilization. Space exploration does not promise a new earth. All means of escape and isolation have been exhausted. All that we have left is a new spiritual continent that stands above distressed hope and endurance, that stands in truth.
Man, long accustomed to seeing only himself, has become nothing to himself. At the peril of his own life, he has dismissed all thoughts about the risks to which he has condemned future generations. Driven by a sense of alienation, he has alienated everyone around him. He has lost his past, and now he renounces the future. He is living in something else’s time, in a missing moment. He lives in some kind of interim, because he has destroyed his own time and scurried towards an aim that is nowhere in sight, not even in his illusions.
The new generations can no longer be put on trial. Our civilization has no right to the time that is coming, just as it had no right to the time that it mutilated and left empty. The new generations have the right to their own school, to research their own creative energies, to use their own consciousness. Their school should be free from blind obedience and charlatans. It will not inherit an identity that can no longer identify with any program of luminosity and sacrality.
The only step that this civilization can take on the threshold of the third millennium is to liberate future generations from the captivity that seeks to condemn them. All the preparations made for the third millennium, so it seems, were in the wrong direction. At any rate, the third millennium does not belong to the world of this civilization. One cannot hijack someone else’s time.
It is uncertain whether our civilization is capable of taking this singular step. But, first and foremost, above all, it is certain that we are meant to understand ourselves. In order to understand ourselves, we need to concentrate our energy on understanding others. In this way, we might arrive at an understanding of the soul itself. We need, furthermore, to head towards the soul itself, to the soul of the whole world, the souls of animals and planets, the soul of matter, the soul of the universe.
Only this can bring us back from our own exile — those of us here in Europe and those of us on other continents, those of us in our past and those of us at the threshold of our last temptation.»
— Radivoje Pešić, Vinča: The Signs and Fate of European Civilization (forthcoming from PRAV Publishing)
