Which town?

For Her city, She had wished for the spontaneous emergence of a living collective organization freely served and animated by conscious souls united in their effort and discipline of manifestation.

Where and how could the two meet?

Into our story a new personage had somehow entered, settled and sat down. In the presence of this figure all at once mythical, human and mechanical, the age long habit of yielding to and relying on the strongest, the most menacing and imposing for justice to be done, mouths to be fed and order to be kept, were surreptitiously reviving in the gestures and attitudes. Before the representative of authority, one wants to make a good impression, or else one want to hide, or hatch some sort of revolt: collaborate, obey and submit, defy, confront and expose, or serve with mute pliancy. But the term “collaboration”, usually indicating a servile cowardice or a calculated opportunism, had for us acquired quite another meaning, that of joining our labor at the service of the truth to come. And could such a formidable machinery, impersonal in its composition but subject to political forces, be ever considered as a collaborator? And its representative among us, what could he really do, what would be the weight of his assessments and accounts? Could one count, beyond the bureaucratic circuit, on an actual, attentive benevolence?

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