Page 14 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

(Which casts up misty columns that become Clouds raining from the re-ascended skies) Lies low but mightily still. – But this is past, My thoughts mistook themselves”
(Manfred, III, 104-115)
Manfred’s honorable aspirations towards being for others clash with his wolverine nature and being for self. Yet, his gray nostalgia, ever so faint, underlying every dialogue and soliloquy, veils an ineffable wistfulness and a sympathy for the human predicament: life as a waterfall, as an analogy of the Fall of Man from its most sublime heights 3⁄4 Paradise. Paradoxically, Manfred’s misanthropy is born out of desperation and despair, out of an unfathomable yearning, an unfathomable longing for paradise lost, for that land of land, from whose clay in His divine image once he was made; and now, nostalgia manifests itself like a palpitating idealism that, in the half light, evades and eludes both, the bloom of existence and of himself. Fallen and exiled from the Garden of Eden, Manfred suffers a second asphyxia and exodus: self-exile so as to be, so as to exist, so as to breathe. Perennially wandering the Israelite deserts of being, he seeks his oasis, his beloved Astarte, image of himself, yet more perfect, from where to drink what remains of the far-off word 3⁄4 O divine breath and logos 3⁄4 then simple, now breast stirring, then becoming what echoes of his Maker heard, in
•14•