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their own opinions and base their actions on these decisions. Many persons are afraid to seek self-adjustment in accordance with individual personality; instead they seek to conform in order not to attract attention. This effort to adjust one's self to others, this conformity, is a basic evil of our time. The result is a lack of real personalities, the degrading in art, the spiritual emptiness and the alarming desperation which makes us face manifold situations in life in utter hopelessness.

Homosexuals, for instance, become afraid as soon as they recognize in themselves that which is essential to them, but which may not be shared with others. They panic when they learn that they deviate from the "norm," It is a pity that much harm is suffered in this during younger years. Many parents hinder the development of the child's personality with an unbelievable Stoicism, not bothering to learn the essential characteristics of their children, while they content themselves to direct the child's education toward middle-class respectability. However, the all-important free development of the personality in the child must be permitted, notwithstanding all the endeavors to the conformity that is so widely supported by laws and social mores.

Homosexuals above all, should be aware of this fact. Many of them flee from this recognition like roused animals all their lives and they forever detest the truths which will permit them to live consciously. They believe it is impossible to live truthfully in public because they feel out of step with the mass not only in their love life, but also in their entire essence. The positive element of homosexualism, however, lies just here in these essential differences. And it can be traced throughout the history of mankind as a plainly visible line.

Off with the masks! Face your real self with courage! Take greater faith in your own integrity!

Laws in many countries mark narrow boundries for the development of the personality and it is a pity how we have to witness again and again the fact that this narrow zone is made narrower still by the lack of courage in ourselves. Freedom is won only by those who earn it, because they are ready to defend it at all times. While we may withdraw and thereby escape a pointing finger, we must always be aware that the few who take off their masks will always be scorned and persecuted, but at the same time, we are indebted to them because their coming into the open makes our own recognition possible. To recognize one's self, and to live consciously-this is the demand which all of us should meet, in solidarity with all our friends over the whole wide world.

Constantine P. Cavafy:

The Last

ALEXANDRIAN

BY PHILIP JASON

Men born out of their time often exercise a certain fascination on their contemporaries, especially if they are touched by genius. But they rarely call forth emulation. This was certainly the case with the poet Cavafy.

No miracle of rejuvenation worked by Isis' magic, but the private vision of this modern Alexandrian, restores to us a world of life and feeling nearly 2000 years dead. In objective time, Constantine P. Cavafy was a man of the 20th Century-a modern Greek born of Constantinopolitan parents in Khedival Egypt in the decade that saw the opening of the Suez Canal. In his own subjective time-the age of his inner vision-he lived and worked in the half-Christian, half-pagan Alexandria of Graeco-Roman times. If the adherents of reincarnation theories want to make out a case, they can do no better than to consider the Cavafian paradox.

A countryman of his, C.A. Trypanis, professor of Byzantine and modern Greek at Oxford, writes in the introduction to an anthology of medieval and modern Greek poets that "The one remarkable man who stands outside any particular school Constantine Cavafy, because of his very personal poetry, although greatly admired in Greece, has never exercised a real influence upon the course of greek literature...' Though fact, this explanation may be a little oversimplified. The question arises: How can a modern literary school result from the work of a man whose achievement, as it were, is to have written the postscript to the poetry of the classic twilight?

Whether it be in his themes, chosen from obscure incidents in ancient times, from the daily life of Graeco-Roman Alexandria, or from his own view of life, in which his own homosexuality stands as self-

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