It is like I’m still sitting under the young fig tree in the garden of our old house, holding the first volume of Ricarda Huch’s work on German Romanticists. It is as if I haven’t left that book at all, despite what I thought, that I abandoned its ideas many years ago. Thus, Schelling’s and Novalis’s romantic ideas, which at one point I thought had vanished with the dreams of the beginnings of youth, have emerged again as familiar ghosts, beloved shadows, from V. S. Solovyov’s teachings and Sophianic visions, after I decided to continue my studies and focus on this Russian philosopher.

When I started my studies, I started to glimpse Schelling’s face lightly impressed on the windows, when I fixed my eyes on the horizon, contemplating Sophia and trying to decipher her riddles and figure out her manifestations. The path that led me from the mythical and magical to reason and sobriety also led me to the Sphinx, who told me that the path was dialectical and would lead again to magic, and to that which is beyond.

It is the youth of the mind that refuses to leave, so it stays. However, it does not stay as a heavy and stubborn corpse but as a beautiful lady who regenerates her beauty day after day; and every time she leaves me for years, she returns more beautiful with a more tender look. This is the face of Sophia, which no matter how it changes and wears different charming masks, it retains the same most beautiful eyes ever. Those eyes who know and bestow knowledge, as though they are yesterday, today, and forever and ever till the end of ages. They are the same eyes that when I stare at them, I see my own, though mixed with another element that comes from the depths of the vast cosmos. It is the one hymn that are sung in countless melodies over its deep melody.

It is as if the finger that pointed out that book on that day is still pointing towards something. From behind the windows, from behind my back. I feel it trying to slip a fragment of paper between the pages of my books, and I guess that the writing on it says: “do you think that what you forget forgets you?!”

It is that most sacred principle that we think we know by name, to discover later that we only know it by gestures and conjectures, altering its names as a fugitive who alters his name and garments, without changing his eyes and loves and his sole longing.

It is as if what I’m tired of, what I abandoned, wants me to investigate it more and more. Thus, it returns to me, with eyes of a child, and a beloved woman, and a very old friend. And the pallid becomes vivid again.

By Fadi Abu-Deeb

From: Syria

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