radicalarchives

[from a letter to Emma Goldman]

“To grasp your hand, to look down for a mute, immortal instant into your soul, and then die at your hands, Beloved, with the warm breath of your caress wafting into peaceful eternity – oh, it were bliss supreme, the realization of our day dreams, when, in transports of ecstasy, we kissed the image of the Social Revolution.”

……

“Every penny spent for ourselves was so much taken from the Cause. True, the revolutionist must live. But luxury is a crime; worse, a weakness. One could exist on five cents a day. Twenty cents for a single meal! It was robbery.”

= = =

Alexander Berman, Prison Memoirs (NY: New York Review of Books, 1999), 148-49, 72.