Which town?

clothes, decorative objects, engravings and jewellery, each of these enterprises solicited the same creative urge and care for quality, perfection, innovation while, at the same time, promoting social action, a common spirit which became the recognizable mark of every product conceived and realized in Her city and earned public appreciation. In this atmosphere, naturally, those who now wished to join the community would seek to make themselves useful. And consequently the range of individual motivations broadened, while this more central motive, this more essential need and urge for a real change of consciousness, seemed to grow more occult. Moreover the new legal and administrative demands were introducing the terms of an ordinary assessment of all actions, objects and comportments. After all, it is not immediately obvious that the realization of a concrete human unity requires more than just honest good-will. What everyone could understand, each one at one’s present level of experience, was the yoga of work, the yoga of action – this, each and everyone could attempt it. A sort of leveling by the average.

*

And so it was, in this peculiar transitional mixture – or balancing out – that some in the community applied themselves to present an exhibition on the theme of evolution, so as to better situate this adventure of a new city; but they omitted all explicit reference to the Agenda, even though its 13 volumes were already published and available. Learning of it, S. saw in this omission an absurd revenge of mediocrity, a renouncing and a sort of betrayal of precisely both the evolutionary significance and driving force of the whole enterprise, and formally conveyed his farewells.

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