Heretics

To belong or stop belonging. To believe or not believe. Even to live or to die

Dear Maestro: this wise man confirmed for me at that moment the answer that I have sought for years. For him, seeing your work, there was something that was obvious: art is power. Only that, or especially that: power. Not to control countries and change societies, to cause revolutions or oppress others. It is the power to touch the souls of men and, incidentally, place there the seeds of their improvement and happiness

There is something intimate and mysterious, an unsettling layer below the surface that comes from that face and from that gaze. It is a combination of humanity and transcendence. It is obvious, your Maestro has a power.

There are inviolable Commandments relating to good and evil, but there is also a lot of space in life that should be only a question of the individual. And it would be worth it for man to manage it freely, according to his will, just as it is: a question between him and God . . .” he said and devoted several minutes to contemplating the painting until he spoke again: “I do not know much about this art. I have never heard of your Maestro. From what I see, I understand that he is a famous man, that kings and rich men pay for his work . . . And now I also understand why you want to make him the repository of your thoughts and experiences of these terrible days . . .

We had just received the news of this massacre when several Jews arrived in Zamość who had escaped from the Cossacks’ incursions on the other side of the Dnieper River, where the events of Nemirov and Tulczyn had repeated themselves. According to those survivors, Chmiel the Pursuer already had an army of five hundred thousand souls and, in fact, controlled all of Little Russia, and at this pace, like the tenth plague, he not only killed Jews but also destroyed churches and tortured the priests.

whom they disbanded. As could be expected, the victors, drunk with success, then unleashed their cruelty against their opponents and carried out a great quantity of decapitations, kidnappings, rapes, and confiscations of goods, from Catholics as well as Jews. To stop the killing, several princes from small Russia decided to make a pact with Chmiel, and came to swear fidelity to the ataman as they had previously sworn to the king

The current rebellion began developing a few years ago due to disputes between Prince Choraczy, general of the Polish army, and a military chief, the ataman, as the Cossacks call them, a certain Bogdan Chmielnicki. This man, also known as Chmiel, communicates, like almost all countryfolk, with the Byzantine church, despite having studied with the Jesuits and, they say, he speaks Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Latin, and came to become Ataman thanks to his raids and ferocity as well as for the immensity of his possessions.

cannot stop hearing the cries of panic of some men driven insane by fear, pushed to undertake a desperate flight. Beings driven away by the vision of the most atrocious torture to which a human being can subject another, warned of their fate by the stench of charred human flesh, blood, and carrion that has taken over that unfortunate country. You will soon understand the reasons for which they flee, but know that not even my greatest efforts will be capable of expressing what these men have lived, nor of drawing the images that their stories have hung in my soul. Not even the great Dürer, who alarmed us so with his infernal visits, considered by many to be the by-products of a sick mind, would have had sufficient mastery to portray what has happened and is happening in these lands. No imagination would be able to journey as deeply into horror as what has occurred here in reality.

And he asked forgiveness for what he would make him read. More intrigued by that request for mercy, Conde began reading the fragment of the found letter, but without being able to glimpse the darkness of the human condition that he would be forced to stare down into from the first to the last lines of what was written

I was starting to imagine why you talk like that. It’s extremely easy to know . . . I’ve also devoured alllll of them. A bunch of times. With love and squalor . . .”