Now listen to the fatidical Pole Przybyszewski: "In the beginning
there was sex, out of sex there was nothing and in it everything
was. And sex made itself brain whence was the birth of the soul."
And then, as Mr. Vance Thompson, who first Englished this "Mass
of the Dead"--wrote: "He pictures largely in great cosmic
symbols, decorated with passionate and mystic fervors, the
singular combat between the growing soul and the sex from which
it fain would be free." Arno Holz thus parodies Przybyszewski:
"In our soul there is surging and singing a song of the
victorious bacteria. Our blood lacks the white corpuscles. On the
sounding board of our consciousness there echoes along the
frightful symphony of the flesh. It becomes objective in Chopin;
he alone, the modern primeval man, puts our brains on the green
meadows, he alone thinks in hyper-European dimensions. He alone
rebuilds the shattered Jerusalem of our souls."All of which shows
to what comically delirious lengths this sort of deleterious soul-
probing may go.
It would be well to consider this word "decadent" and its morbid
implications.
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