Anthem/Chapter 5

We made it. We created it. We brought
it forth from the night of the ages.
We alone. Our hands. Our mind.
Ours alone and only.
We know not what we are saying. Our head
is reeling. We look upon the light which
we have made. We shall be forgiven for
anything we say tonight. . . .
Tonight, after more days and trials
than we can count, we finished building
a strange thing, from the remains of the
Unmentionable Times, a box of glass, devised
to give forth the power of the sky of greater
strength than we had ever achieved before.
And when we put our wires to this box,
when we closed the current--the wire glowed!
It came to life, it turned red, and a circle
of light lay on the stone before us.
We stood, and we held our head in our hands.
We could not conceive of that which
we had created. We had touched no
flint, made no fire. Yet here was light,
light that came from nowhere, light from
the heart of metal.
We blew out the candle. Darkness swallowed us.
There was nothing left around us,
nothing save night and a thin thread of
flame in it, as a crack in the wall of a prison.
We stretched our hands to the wire,
and we saw our fingers in the red glow.
We could not see our body nor feel it,
and in that moment nothing existed save our
two hands over a wire glowing in a black abyss.
Then we thought of the meaning of that
which lay before us. We can light our
tunnel, and the City, and all the Cities of
the world with nothing save metal and
wires. We can give our brothers a new
light, cleaner and brighter than any they
have ever known. The power of the sky
can be made to do men's bidding. There
are no limits to its secrets and its might,
and it can be made to grant us anything if
we but choose to ask.
Then we knew what we must do. Our
discovery is too great for us to waste our
time in sweeping the streets. We must not
keep our secret to ourselves, nor buried
under the ground. We must bring it into
the sight of all men. We need all our time,
we need the work rooms of the Home of
the Scholars, we want the help of our
brother Scholars and their wisdom joined
to ours. There is so much work ahead for
all of us, for all the Scholars of the world.
In a month, the World Council of Scholars
is to meet in our City. It is a great Council,
to which the wisest of all lands are
elected, and it meets once a year in the
different Cities of the earth. We shall go to
this Council and we shall lay before them,
as our gift, this glass box with the power of
the sky. We shall confess everything to them.
They will see, understand and forgive.
For our gift is greater than our transgression.
They will explain it to the Council of Vocations,
and we shall be assigned to the Home of the Scholars.
This has never been done before, but neither
has a gift such as ours ever been offered to men.
We must wait. We must guard our tunnel as
we had never guarded it before. For should
any men save the Scholars learn of
our secret, they would not understand it,
nor would they believe us. They would see
nothing, save our crime of working alone,
and they would destroy us and our light.
We care not about our body, but our light is . . .
Yes, we do care. For the first time do we
care about our body. For this wire is as a
part of our body, as a vein torn from us,
glowing with our blood. Are we proud of
this thread of metal, or of our hands
which made it, or is there a line to
divide these two?
We stretch out our arms. For the first
time do we know how strong our arms are.
And a strange thought comes to us:
we wonder, for the first time in our life,
what we look like. Men never see their
own faces and never ask their brothers
about it, for it is evil to have concern for
their own faces or bodies. But tonight,
for a reason we cannot fathom, we wish
it were possible to us to know the
likeness of our own person.
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