Zissimos Lorenzatos: This is Tradition

This is Tradition.  There are dead people who direct the course of our lives, today and in the case of every young generation, and there are living people who the louder they shout, the more clear it becomes that they are dead before their time.  This is Tradition: only those live who are living, no matter though some of these have died years ago.  Again, every young generation will direct the life of that tradition; this too is traditional, and from this point of view, what we call originality does not exist, except as an immature fantasy.  Tradition alone exists fully; for tradition is life- indeed, it is the higher stage of life which makes no distinction between living and dead.  Whenever we possess true life, we possess tradition; we possess a tradition which is added to, developed, enriched.  The last become first and the first last.  Of those who constitute tradition it could be said that they all belong to the present.  Tradition is neither the past nor the future- although it is more future than past, since it lives in the eternal present; and this is tradition, a power that goes hand in hand with life.  Life and tradition are one.  In tradition, this moment is not merely this moment, but all the past present within this moment, and perhaps part of the future as well.