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Page Four

libertarian views which he expressed in action and words.

And in the violet Paris landscape of early evening, my friend translated a wonderful poem of Hikmet's. Let me paraphase [[paraphrase]] it..A young Chinese soldier comes to Paris and visits the Louvre. There he falls in love with the Mona Lisa, and, interestingly, she returns his affection, completely...Since love will find a way, the soldier manages to land an airplane on the roof of the Louvre. The Mona Lisa is enabled to escape from her mausoleum and the lovers fly off to China where they both join the Army.

We all know that the Mona Lisa has returned to her glass enclosed frame at the Louvre. But the power of the artistic imagination and vision is such that we can accept as credible a new symbolic sense of reality, for very often the world of the artist is more real, move [[more]] compelling than the world it supposedly represents. For example, in this poem of Hikmet's, which comes as a radiance from a dark place, the soldier and the Mona Lisa are symbols for the poet's concept of freedom. In contrast to my friend the painter, Hikmet was more free because his imagination was boundless, and he refused to let the circumstances of imprisonment defeat him as an artist. For each art is fashioned with independence and freedom, it enlarges the understanding people have of themselves and of other people, and it also serves to knit differences of race, language, and nationality into a rewarding intellectual and moral experience.

Whether artists deal passionately with the world about them as Picasso did in his Guernica, and, as Bessie Smith did with the Blues; or else considers the abstract discipline of the mind as did Mondrian and