Dear Zama,
We are a people of the sea. For our soul yearns for the sea. For only the sea is vast enough that we might long for it. For the sea has no end and yet meets the shore. For our spirit seeks abroad what it believes lost at home. For we come from the sea and would return to the sea; for the sun, towards which we wish to rise, rises in the sea and sinks into the sea.
Every people that settles upon the coasts of the sea has a different name for it. Inland Sea. Great Sea. Sea of Stars. Only we have none. For two and a half thousand years we have simply said:
Our Sea.
But the water has turned poisonous and foul. And so we have exchanged the sky for the sea. Our machines cross the blue of heaven as the explorers’ ships of old crossed the ocean. In the whirring of propellers and engines, the waves of the shore rush on. The clouds are nothing other than the foaming spray. Above us the canopy of stars unfolds, as it once showed our forebears the way.
The sky is our new sea.
I have sailed this sea. In ceaseless search of you. I have counted no miles, no years, no countries. The seas preserve only memories; deep below, where sunken cities crumble and shipwrecks vanish into forests of coral.
I have tried to chain my memories to a stone and cast them into the sea. Others can do this. They have suppressed what our homeland was, before ideology consumed the spirit. [STRUCK THROUGH] I envy these people; I despise these people.
For to suppress is to be unloving towards memory. To remember is to love a thing so dearly that one cannot forget it. The burning, ardent memory of the past is love, for love means: to wish someone well.
My weakness, of which this century accuses me, is my love of truth. Where truth becomes a crime, silence is all that remains to me. It is better to be silent than to risk telling a lie.
Silence is no retreat. In a world of dull, droning speech, silence is protest. He who meets a question with defiant silence does not consent. He who answers loud propaganda with outrage joins in. He has entered the system of the frenzied, animal circus of feeling. God did not create the soul for noise. In the winds of the heights and the rhythm of the waves it comes home.
Even were you to return, you would not recognise our homeland. It is mere scenery of steel and glass, peopled by mannequins of flesh and blood. Where there is no truth, there is no love, and where there is no love, there is no memory.
The High Command has determined that you are dead. And the Colonel has told me that this is the kindest form of warning to abandon my search, lest consequences befall me. Consequences which do not trouble me, even were they a court martial. But consequences which would befall comrades, friends, and trusted men, should I not fall in line. The system knows how to wear a man down, even when he hovers five thousand metres above the sea.
This is my last message. I entrust it to the sea, in the hope that the sea will unite us, as it has united our people across the centuries. For I believe that you live, and that more than chance binds us as human beings. For I love too much, and have grown too little numb, to suppress what I remember.
And because the noise of the world passes.
Your brother,
Scipio
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