Pleasure

by Gabriele D'annunzio

  The convalescent discovered forgotten childhood sensations, that impression of coolness lent to childish blood by the gusts of salty wind, those inexpressible effects lent by the lights, shadows, colors, smells of water on the virgin soul. The sea was not only a delight for his eyes but also a perennial wave of peace at which his thoughts drank, a magical fountain of youth in which his body regained its health and his spirit its nobility. The sea held for him the mysterious attraction of a fatherland; and he surrendered himself to it with filial familiarity, like a weak son in the arms of an omnipotent father. And he took comfort from it; because no one has ever confided his pain, his desire, his dream to the sea in vain.

  The sea always had a profound word for him, full of sudden revelations, unexpected illuminations, unforeseen meanings. It uncovered in his secret soul a still-living, though hidden, ulcer and made it bleed; but the balm thereafter was sweeter. It shook awake in his heart a sleeping chimera and incited it so that he could once again feel its nails and its beak; but then it killed it and buried it in his heart forever. It awoke in his memory a recollection and it revived it such that he suffered all the bitterness of regret for things that were irremediably lost; but then it lavished upon him the sweetness of an endless oblivion. Nothing remained hidden in that soul, in the presence of the great consoler. In the same way that a strong electrical current makes metals luminous and reveals their essence by the color of their flame, the virtue of the sea illuminated and revealed all the powers and the potentialities of that human soul.

  At certain times the convalescent, under the assiduous dominion of such a virtue, under the assiduous yoke of such fascination, felt a sort of bewilderment and almost of dismay, as if that dominion and that yoke were unbearable, due to his weakness. At certain times he derived from the incessant exchange between his soul and the sea a vague sense of prostration, as if that great discourse caused too much violence to his distressed intellect, eager to comprehend the incomprehensible. Any sadness of the waters upset him like a misfortune.

  One day, he saw himself lost. Bloody and evil vapors burned on the horizon, casting splashes of blood and gold onto the dark waters; a tangle of purple clouds arose from the vapors, resembling a skirmish of enormous centaurs above a flaming volcano; and in that tragic light a funeral procession of triangular sails was etched in black on the farthest rim. They were sails of an indescribable hue, as sinister as the insignia of death; marked with crosses and shadowy figures; they resembled the sails of fleets carrying plague-infested cadavers to some cursed island populated by ravenous vultures. A human sense of terror and pain loomed over that sea; an agonizing dejection burdened that air. The gush spurting from the wounds of the brawling monsters did not ever abate; rather it grew into rivers that reddened the waters throughout the entire area, right up to the shore, becoming tinted here and there with violet and greenish shades as if it were decaying. Every now and then the knot collapsed, the bodies became deformed or tore apart, bleeding strips dangled down from the crater or disappeared, swallowed by the abyss. Then, after the great collapse, the giants, regenerated, once again sprang into battle, more atrocious than before; the mound recomposed itself, more enormous than before; and the massacre began again, redder than before, until the combatants were left drained of blood amid the ashes of dusk, lifeless, defeated, on the semi-extinct volcano.

  It seemed like an episode from some primitive Titanomachia,8 a heroic spectacle, seen over a long succession of epochs in the fabled sky. Andrea, his heart suspended, followed the entire succession of events. Accustomed to the tranquil descent of shadow in that serene decline of summer, he now felt himself shaken, uplifted, and confused by the unusual contrast, with a strange violence. At first, it was like a confused anguish, tumultuous, full of unwitting tremors. Fascinated by the bellicose sunset, he was not yet able to see clearly inside himself. But when the ash of dusk rained down extinguishing every war, and the sea resembled an immense leaden swamp, he believed he could hear in the shadow the shout of his soul, the shout of other souls.

  It was inside him, like a gloomy shipwreck in the shadow. Many, many voices called for help, imploring for help, cursing death; familiar voices, voices to which he had once listened (voices of human beings or of phantoms?); and now he could not distinguish the one from the other! They called, they implored, they cursed uselessly, feeling themselves perish; they grew feebler, suffocated by the voracious wave; they became weaker, distant, interrupted, unrecognizable; they became a moan; they died away; they rose up no more.

  He was left alone. Of his entire youth, of his entire interior life, of all his ideals, nothing remained. Inside him there was nothing but a cold empty abyss; around him was impassive nature, the perennial source of pain for the solitary soul. Every hope was dimmed; every voice was mute; every anchor was broken. What was there to live for?

  At once, the image of Elena rose up again in his memory. Other images of women superimposed themselves upon it, mingled with it, dispersed it, became dispersed. He could not stop any one of them. All appeared to smile, an enemy smile, when vanishing; and all, in vanishing, seemed to take away with them something of his. What? He did not know. An unspeakable disheartenment oppressed him; a sense almost of oldness chilled him; his eyes filled with tears. A tragic warning sounded in his heart: “Too late!”

  The recent sweetness of peace and melancholy seemed already distant; it seemed to be an illusion that had already escaped him; it almost seemed to him that it had been enjoyed by some other spirit, new, foreign, which had entered him and then disappeared. It seemed to him that his old spirit by now could neither renew nor uplift itself again. All the wounds that he had inflicted without restraint on the dignity of his internal being bled. All the degradations that he had inflicted on his conscience without repugnance emerged like stains and spread like leprosy. All the violations that he had without shame committed on his ideals roused an acute remorse in him, desperate, terrible, as if inside him wept the souls of his daughters whom he, their father, had stripped of their virginity while they slept, dreaming.

  And he wept with them; and it seemed to him that his tears did not go down to his heart like a balm, but rebounded as if from some slimy or cold substance with which his heart was bound. The ambiguity, the simulation, the falsity, the hypocrisy, all the forms of falsehood and fraud in the life of sentiment, all adhered to his heart like tenacious mistletoe.

  He had lied too much, had deceived too much, had debased himself too much. Revulsion of himself and his vice invaded him. For shame! For shame! The dishonorable ugly deed seemed indelible to him; the wounds seemed untreatable; it seemed to him that he would have to bear the nausea forever, forever, like an interminable torment. For shame! He wept, bent over the windowsill, collapsed beneath the weight of his misery, overcome like a man who cannot see salvation; and he did not see the stars twinkle one by one on his piteous head, in the depth of evening.

  With the new day he had a pleasant awakening, one of those fresh and limpid awakenings that are experienced only by the Adolescent during his triumphant springs. The morning was a wonder; to breathe in the morning was an immense beatitude. All things were living in the bliss of the light; the hills seemed to be draped in a diaphanous silver awning, stirred by an agile quiver; the sea appeared to be crossed by milky coasts, by crystal rivers, by emerald streams, by a thousand veins that formed the fickle web of a liquid labyrinth. A sense of nuptial joy and religious grace emanated from the concordance of sea, sky, and earth.

  He breathed, watched, listened, slightly astonished. In his sleep, his fever had healed. He had closed his eyes in the night, lulled by the chorus of the waters as by a friendly and faithful voice. Those who fall asleep to the sound of that voice find repose full of therapeutic tranquillity. Not even a mother’s words induce sleep as pure and beneficial to the son who suffers.

  He watched, listened, mute, engrossed, touched, allowing that wave of immortal life to enter him. Never
had the sacred music of a supreme master, an Offertory by Joseph Haydn or a Te Deum by Wolfgang Mozart, moved him as much as he was now moved by the simple bells of the distant churches, greeting the ascension of Day into the heavens of the One God in Three Divine Persons. He felt his heart fill and overflow with emotion. Something like a vague but great dream rose in his soul, something like an undulating veil through which the mysterious treasure of happiness shone. Until now he had always known what he desired, and had almost never desired in vain. Now he could not tell what he desired; he did not know. But certainly, the desired thing would be infinitely sweet, because it was sweet even to desire it.

  The verses of the Chimera in the “King of Cyprus,” ancient verses, almost forgotten, returned to his memory, and sounded like an enticement.

  Do you want to fight?

  Kill? See rivers of blood?

  great mounds of gold? herds of captive

  females? slaves? other, other preys? Do you want

  to bring marble to life? Erect a temple?

  Compose an immortal hymn? Do you want (do you hear me,

  young man, do you hear me?) do you want to love

  divinely?

  The Chimera repeated to him in his secret heart, in a subdued voice, with obscure pauses:

  Do you hear me,

  young man, do you hear me: do you want to love

  divinely?

  He smiled a little. And he thought: Love whom? Art? A woman? Which woman? Elena seemed far away, lost, dead, no longer his; the others seemed even farther, lost forever. He was free, therefore. Why ever would he once more carry out a futile and perilous search? Deep in his heart there was the desire to give himself, freely and for acknowledgment, to a higher and purer being. But where was this being? The Ideal poisons every imperfect possession; and in love every possession is imperfect and deceiving, every pleasure is mixed with sadness, every enjoyment is halved, every joy carries within it a seed of suffering, every surrender carries within it a seed of doubt; and doubts destroy, contaminate, corrupt all delights just as Harpies rendered all foods inedible for Phineas. Why ever, therefore, would he once again stretch out his hand to the tree of knowledge?

  The tree of knowledge has been pluck’d—all’s known—

  as George Byron intones in Don Juan. In truth, for the future, his health would be found in “εuλαβεια,”9 namely, in prudence, in refinement, in caution, in wisdom. This understanding of his seemed to be well expressed in the sonnet of a contemporary poet,10 whom he favored for a certain affinity of literary tastes and commonality of aesthetic education.

  I will be like he who lies down

  beneath the shade of a great laden tree

  sated, by now, of drawing crossbow or arch;

  and over his head ripe fruit is suspended.

  He does not shake that branch, nor does he stretch out

  his hand, nor lie in wait for his prey.

  He lies there; and gathers with a frugal gesture

  the fruits bestowed by that branch to the earth.

  Of such sweet pulp he does not bite

  into the depth, to seek its inner essence,

  because he fears the bitterness; rather he sniffs it,

  then sucks, with clear pleasure, without

  greed, neither sad nor joyful.

  His brief fable is already done.

  But “εuλαβεια,” if it serves to exclude pain, in part, from life, also excludes every lofty ideal. Health therefore was to be found in a type of Goethian equilibrium between a cautious and refined practical Epicureanism and the profound and passionate worship of Art.

  Art! Art! Here was the faithful Lover, always young, immortal; here was the Source of pure joy, forbidden to the multitude, conceded to the elect; here was the precious Food, which makes man similar to a god. How could he have drunk from other cups after bringing his lips to that one? How could he have sought other pleasures after having tasted the supreme one? How could his spirit have held other turbulences after having felt within it the unforgettable tumult of creative force? How could his hands have idled and frolicked wantonly over the bodies of women after having felt a tangible form erupt from his fingers? How, ultimately, could his senses have weakened and become perverted into base lust after having been illumined by a sensibility that discerned invisible lines in the appearance of things, perceived the imperceptible, gauged the hidden thoughts of Nature?

  A sudden enthusiasm invaded him. In that religious morning, he wanted to kneel again at the altar and, as in Goethe’s poem, read his acts of devotion in Homer’s liturgy.11

  But what if my intelligence has fallen into decline? What if my hand has lost its skill? If I were no longer worthy? At this doubt, such strong dismay assailed him that with a puerile frenzy, he began to seek out some immediate proof to be sure that his fear was unreasonable. He would have liked immediately to carry out a real experiment: compose a difficult verse, draw a figure, engrave a copperplate, solve some problem of form. And so? And then? Would that not be a failed experiment? The slow decline of intellect can also be unconscious: here lies the terrible fact. The artist who slowly loses his faculties is not aware of his progressive weakness; because together with the power of producing and reproducing, his critical judgment and criteria also abandon him. He can no longer distinguish the defects of his work; he does not know that his work is bad or mediocre; he deludes himself; he believes that his painting, his statue, his poem are within the laws of Art, whereas they are outside of them. Here lies the terrible fact. The artist who has been struck in his intellect may have no conscience of his own imbecility, just as the madman has no conscience of his own aberration. And so?

  It was a kind of panic for the convalescent. He pressed his temples between the palms of his hands; and remained for a few moments subject to the jolt of that fearsome thought, beneath the horror of that threat, as if annihilated. Better, better to die! Never, as in that moment, had he felt the divine merit of the gift; never, as in that moment, had the spark seemed sacred to him. His entire being trembled with a strange violence, at the sole doubt that that gift could be destroyed, that that spark could be extinguished. Better to die!

  He lifted his head; shook all inertia from himself; went down to the park; walked slowly beneath the trees, not having any definite thought. A light breeze drifted through the treetops; at intervals, the leaves were disturbed by a strong rustling, as if a scurry of squirrels were passing through them; small fragments of sky appeared between the branches, like blue eyes below green eyelids. In a favorite place, a kind of small sacred grove dominated by a four-headed herm intent upon a fourfold meditation, he stopped; and he sat down on the grass, his shoulders leaning against the base of the statue, his face turned toward the sea. Before him, certain tree trunks, straight and gradually decreasing in length like the reeds of Pan’s pipes, intersected the ultramarine; around him, the acanthus plants opened the basket of their leaves with sovereign elegance, symmetrically incised like Callimachus’s capital.12

  The verses of Salmacis in the Fable of Hermaphrodite came to his mind.

  Noble acanthi, O ye in the earthly

  forests, signs of peace, lofty coronas,

  of pure form; O ye, slender baskets

  that Silence composes with a light hand

  to gather the flower of sylvan

  Dreams, which virtue did you spill onto the beautiful boy

  from the dark, sweet leaves?

  He sleeps, naked; his head supported by his arm.

  He recalled other verses, and others still, others still, tumultuously. His soul filled up completely with music made up of rhymes and rhythmic syllables. He rejoiced; that spontaneous sudden poetic agitation gave him an inexpressible delight. He listened to those sounds inside himself, pleased with the rich images, the precise epithets, the lucid metaphors, the studied harmonies, the exquisite
combinations of hiatus and diaeresis, of all the most subtle refinements that varied his style and his meter, of all the mysterious artifices of the hendecasyllable learned from the admirable poets of the fourteenth century, and especially from Petrarch. The magic of the verses subjugated his spirit once again; and the sentential hemistich of a contemporary poet cheered him in particular. “The Verse is everything.”13

  The verse is everything. In the imitation of Nature, no instrument of art is more alive, agile, acute, varied, multiform, plastic, obedient, sensitive, faithful. More compact than marble, more malleable than clay, more subtle than fluid, more vibrating than a cord, more luminous than a gem, more fragrant than a flower, sharper than a sword, more flexible than a germinating shoot, more caressing than a murmur, more terrible than thunder, the verse is everything and is capable of everything. It can render the smallest motions of sentiment and the smallest motions of sensation; it can define the indefinable and say the unutterable; it can embrace the unlimited and penetrate the abyss; it can have dimensions of eternity; it can represent the superhuman, the supernatural, the awesome; it can inebriate like wine, ravish like ecstasy; it can possess at the same time our intellect, our spirit, our body; it can, ultimately, reach the Absolute. A perfect verse is absolute, immutable, immortal; it holds within it words with the coherence of a diamond; it encloses thought as in a precise circle that no force will ever manage to break; it becomes independent of any bond and any dominion; it belongs no longer to its creator, but to everyone and to no one, like space, like light, like immanent and perpetual things. A thought expressed exactly in a perfect verse is a thought that already existed preformed in the obscure depths of language. Extracted by the poet, it continues to exist in the consciousness of men. The greatest poet is therefore the one who knows how to uncover, extricate, extract a greater number of these ideal preformations. When the poet is near to the discovery of one such eternal verse, he is alerted by a divine torrent of joy that suddenly invades his entire being.