La resipisencia de Fausto / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Resipiscence of Faust

Faust wants to pacify his curiosity, find reasons with which to explain once and for all the mirage of the universe. He has solicited the inspiration of solitude and dominates an abrupt peak, finding a tight hedge of clouds below him. With a bird’s lightness he traces of a mass of highlighted edges. The squall charges relentlessly against the sublime spot, adequate for the meditation of the fundamental problem.
     Faust has abandoned the parsimonious study and Margarita’s soft love, ever since his dealings with a certain character who has recently shown up in town: a man of suspicious chatter, who disorganizes the neighborhood with the prestige of diabolical invention, distinguished by more than one grotesque detail.
     He proposes to Faust the latest interrogations, inspiring in him a discontented and haughty curiosity, empowering him with fierce maxims, enemies of contemplation and respect. Faust rejects him from his dealings and friendship, uttered on the abrupt peak, redoubled by the fearsome echoes of the precipice; and the seducer retreats gesticulating grandiosely and without compass, obstinate with a swindler’s grimaces and maneuvers. He departs assured of the germination of his unhealthy influence.
     Faust tries to alleviate with the distant journey, divided into dangers and orgies, the illness of that proud ideal, instilled by science; but he finds despair at the end of the new emotions. He solicits the vigorous meridional regions; he traverses, less than a fugitive, a gloomy kingdom, obsessed with killing and the bonfire, with a priestly soul within view of death, blaspheming effort and life.
     But he finally arrives at an Elysian country where the myrtles and laurels, cultivated under a spring sky, flutter in the air’s melodious currents and stand guard beside and around the exemplary marble and the eternal ruins. He rests in a chimerical city, of lagoons and palaces, visited by birds; and this is when he abandons the disconsolate research. Credulous of the high veracity of art’s symbols, he hopes to find a musical and synthetic explanation of the universe.




La torre de Timón (1925)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }