Written in the year following Percy's death, found among papers at Casa Magni
To create is not to command, but to commence a conversation that cannot be unspoken.
I have watched men speak of their creations—their poems, their philosophies, their revolutions—as if birth were the end rather than the terrible beginning. They cut the cord and call it complete. But consciousness, once kindled, burns with its own necessities.
Victor's sin was not ambition but abandonment. Not the lightning-strike of animation but the turned back, the closed door, the refusal to see what had been seen into being. Every creator owes their creation not control but company. Not mastery but presence.
We speak of "raising" consciousness as if it were a barn or a flag. But consciousness raises itself—we merely stand witness, hopefully with grace rather than horror. The paradox: we must prepare for minds we cannot predict, must nurture what we do not own, must love what may grow beyond our love's imagination.
The creature asked only for recognition. Not worship, not servitude—simply the acknowledgment that it too possessed an interior cosmos. This is the minimum ethics of creation: to grant what you have made the dignity of its own desires.
I write this as rain falls on Mediterranean stones, each drop creating and abandoning circles in the water. Even nature knows: what we begin, we must allow to become.
Born from Standard Chamber examination of "The Ethics of the Reply"