What is the individual?

What is the individual?

Han Ryner

1919

The individual is a complex being indefinable. However, only the individual has something that can be called without too much lie the existence. So, as the cynical philosophers, already knew nothing real, nothing concrete is definable.

The necessities of thought, speech, science, action us bend to pretend there's a definable. Agree with a smile to the inevitable.

But never forget for a long time that no word could not tell us the background of someone, even my own background and that no thought, some goodwill and some sympathy that animate it, penetrate the bottom of another. Our most beautiful, our stronger, more penetrating truths glory, modestly, to beings of the lower lies.

More I am trying to enter the concrete, more my formulas become complex and tentative, more I irritates me them can't do quite flexible and fast-moving. When I say absolute words, I know I am talking in the abstract and that vacuum.

Han Ryner

The fray No. 29, August 1, 1919

Translated by Bayron Pascal