As you sit in your quiet home, surrounded by peace, comfort and civilization...
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Do you, listener, remember those memories...
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Grand and tearful, which still, after hundreds of years,
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Remain now radiant with the brightness of sunlight,
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And now darkening, like indelible bloodstains...
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The variegated pages of history.
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Can your thoughts, torpid with repose,
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Transport themselves back to the horrors and joys of the past...
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Not straying indifferently from one thing to another which excites your curiosity,
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But taking a warm and vital interest, as if you yourself stood in the midst of those struggles,
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Now long since fought out... bled in them, conquered or fell in them,
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And felt your heart beat with hope or apprehension according as fortune smiled or betrayed...
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Standing on the heights of history, looking far around the wild arena of human destiny,
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Can you transfer yourself into the well of the past?
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A life physically buried and decayed, but spiritually inmost,
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Which constitutes the essence and substance of history...
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Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart,
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Waging all things in the balance of reason?
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Is not rather the genius of history like an eternally blooming maiden, full of fire,
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With a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
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Therefore, if you have the capacity to suffer or rejoice with the generation that had been...
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To hate with them... to love with them... to be transported to admire, to despise,
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To curse as they have done - in a word:
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To live among them with your whole heart and not alone with your cold, reflecting judgement...
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... then follow me.
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I will lead you down into the well.
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My hand is weak and my sketch humble, but your heart will guide you better than I.
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Upon that I rely... and begin.
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Prologue For R. R. R.
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| Turisas |
