The space. A section of our Earth is seen in the farness that turns smaller and smaller till it will be similar to stars and mingles with the others. The scene starts with semi-darkness that turns slowly into total darkness. ADAM as old man and LUCIFER are flying.
ADAM
Where our raging flight will lead us, tell me!
LUCIFER
Did not you want of dirty ground to be free, Did you? To get the superb world from where
3590 You have heard the sound of similar spirits, If I caught you well.
ADAM
That’s true but I did not Fancy my way to them to be so bleak.
This space’s so bare, so unfamiliar As sacrilegist would be haunting in it,
3595 And in my heart two feelings are fighting:
I feel how sordid’s the ground and that it Restricts my superb soul, I want to leave it;
I wish it back, I’m gone away, that cause pain.
Ah, Lucifer! Just look back upon our Earth,
3600 At first nice flowers have pass’d out of our sight, Then leaves of the forests have disappear’d;
The well-known landscape with its marvellous scenes Degraded into characterless plain.
All that was charming has become indistinct.
3605 Now cliffs have been changed into shrunken bad lumps.
Clouds with thunderbolt meaning to peasants from Above the holy voice and startling them,
Degenerate to pity and woeful haze.
The great infinity of roaring sea,
3610 Where has it got to? It’s only a grey spot On the sphere that is revolving and will
Mingle with thousands of stars, that was our world.
And, Lucifer! What, ah what is with her Is it my fate to leave, to leave also her?
-LUCIFER
3615 Well, from our sublime aspect first the charm will Disappear, this is follow’d by greatness
And power, and as a final result
We shall have only the cold mathematics.
-ADAM
The stars are left behind us and I don’t see
3620 My aim and do feel no difficulties.
What good will the life do without love and Struggle? It gives me the creeps, Lucifer!
LUCIFER
If your valiance did take only so long, Then let us turn back to play in the dust.
ADAM
3625 Who says? Let’s go ahead, let’s go ahead, it Is painful only till all the links will
Totally break that bind me to the Earth. -Alas! What is that? My breath dies in me, My strength fails me and my mind is confus’d.
3630 Antaeus would be more than only tale
Who lived till was in contact with the ground of The earth?
THE VOICE OF THE EARTH’S SPIRIT
Yes, this is much more than tale only.
You know me well, the spirit of the Earth.
That’s only me who in you lives, you know.
3635 The barrier’s here and my power stops here.
Come back and you’ll live - go on and you’ll die, Like primitive worm that gambols in its small Droplet. - To you this droplet is the Earth.
ADAM
Defy you, it is useless to frighten me,
3640 Maybe my body is yours, my soul’s mine, Both thought and truth have been never-ending, They lived prior to your material world.
THE VOICE OF THE EARTH’S SPIRIT
Vain man! Try it and you’ll come beastly down.
Whether are prior odour to the rose, or
3645 The shape to body or sunbeam to the sun?
Ah, if you saw your abandoned soul When revolving in the infinite space, When looking for mind and its expression In vain in world that is unfamiliar,
3650 Feeling nothing, and understanding none, You would be horrified. ’Cause all concepts And all sentiments in your own are only The emanation of this group of matter
That you call Earth, that if it were something else,
You took off beauty and the bad, bliss and The hell to you from my own spirit only That gives the order to your tiny home. -Ah, what is here an eternal and great truth
3660 That’s only nonsense in an other world.
And absurdness can be there natural.
Weight does not exist, being does not move, What here is air, maybe there is the thought, What here is light, maybe there is the sound,
3665 What here is growing, maybe there is dead.
ADAM
You won’t deter me, my soul does strive upwards.
-THE VOICE OF -THE EARTH’S SPIRIT
Adam, Adam, your ultimate hour comes:
Return to Earth, you may be mighty there,
But when you wrench yourself from the ring of the
3670 Universe, Lord will not tolerate you when You approach him and blasts you immediately.
-ADAM
Anyhow will death not blast me at all?
THE VOICE OF THE EARTH’S SPIRIT
Do not say, do not say this empty word Of perpetual lie, here in spirits’ world.
-3675 The nature would be horrified at it. -The holy secret is it what Lord has
Kept for himself. The apple of knowledge Could crack it neither.
ADAM
I’ll be who cracks it.
(They fly on. ADAM cries and grows stiff.) I am lost!
-LUCIFER (laughing)
Now, the old lie is triumphant. -(As he drives off ADAM)
3680 This puppet-godship may revolve now in the Space as a novel planet and I do hope
To find some kind of life that will meet my taste.
-THE VOICE OF -THE EARTH’S SPIRIT
Don’t be malicious, Lucifer, don’t be!
He only touch’d the unfamiliar world.
3685 It’s not so easy to leave my own realm.
-Homeward voice calls you, come my son to yourself!
ADAM (coming to his senses) I am alive again. - ’Cause I suffer, But this sorrow is very nice to me, It’s so dreadful to be annihilated.
-3690 Ah, Lucifer! Bring back me to my homeland, Where I fought so much, so much though in vain, Let me again fight and I’ll be happy.
LUCIFER
And in spite of these unsuccessful fights You think your new strife will be successful,
3695 You win your goal, you hope? In fact, this faithful Childish humour’s only the own of man.
-ADAM
This false fancy does not tempt by all means, I know, the aim I shall hundred times not reach.
That is nothing. Really, what’s the aim?
3700 Aim is always the break of heroic fight, Death is the aim and life is the struggle, And man’s aim has been this struggle itself.
LUCIFER
Really, that is nice consolation,
Even if the thought of fight would be so great
3705 Tomorrow you’ll mock for what you now fight, It was nothing what has animated you.
-Did you not bleed to death at Chaironea In the defense of defeated liberty,
And did you not fight for Constantin’s legions
3710 Giving aid him for world hegemony?
Were you not lost as martyr of the faith And later did you not resist to the faith With all results and arms of science itself?
ADAM
That’s true but is the same how infamous was
3715 My thought at that time it animated me, It raised me, so it was great, holy thought, It’s all one, cross or science, liberty or Ambitiousness were fermentative agents, These have forwarded mankind as a whole.
-3720 Ah, let’s go back to the Earth to have new fights.
LUCIFER
Did you forget the word of scientist Who calculated, after four thousand years
Your world will freeze and struggle will be cease?
ADAM
If our wise science would not outdare it.
3725 But it defies it, I feel and I know.
-LUCIFER
What then? Is any fight, greatness, force there In the man-made world that is organized By reason from its grounded theories
What you could observe a short while ago?
-ADAM
3730 Let it just save the earth - it will also
Be over as all things that have perform’d their Mission, and then the great thought will again Raise breathing courage into its dead spirit.
Guide me just back, wish eagerly to know
3735 What’s the new tenet for which I will burn
3736 On the rescued Earth.
-LUCIFER
Let’s go back again!