Seventh: the four positions

07Seventh: the four positions

Position one (paragraph 1): the eagles remember

• Ambitious human beings are depicted as eagles: free, ranging, looking towards the high mountains.
• The eagles remember the plains and their green, their pools, and the rabbits leaping in the grass like pearls — while hunger burns their insides.
• Yet they insist on looking to difficulties that are almost impossible, so they rise above it and soar like suns that slipped out of their orbits.
• Then the horizon becomes their property, the stars their lighthouses, eternity their scheme — and they take the pride that killed their hunger.
• So they forget the dust of the plains, the green of the fields and the stretch of the sands.

Position two (paragraph 2): the rabbits

• An opposite picture: in the deep narrow pass the rabbits squat waiting for a fate bristling with death.
• They eat their grass by fleeing into the burrow, and tremble with fear among the shadows.
• A life of cowardice, fear and permanent surrender.

Position three (paragraph 3): awareness of the danger

• The eagles free in the horizon know their own death: eyes lie in wait for them, and spearheads come in succession behind spearheads.
• That is, they are conscious of being watched and of standing in the place of attack by the spiteful.

Position four (paragraph 4): insistence on the summit

• They grow more proud of themselves and more confident; they raise their heads and soar, they climb high and flutter with triumph.
• They do not remember the green of the plains and their good — instead they track the roses of the summits in the far reaches of space, and the dream of perfection.
• They go on to the summit however their conditions change between success and failure, without looking back.
• Note the contrast: in the first paragraph they remembered the easy comfort, and in the last they do not remember it, absorbed in the summit and eternity.