I had mocked God, I could easily laugh at mankind.
And yet this dark mood was only temporary, and I felt a real pleasure in contemplating genius shining in the home of art like a flower opening wide its rose window of fragrance to a summer sun.
Art – art… what a beautiful thing is that vanity!
If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.
And what littleness! A stone – a word – a sound – the arrangement of all those things that we call the sublime.
I would like something that no longer needed expression or shape. Something as pure as a fragrance, as strong as stone, as elusive as a song; if only it could be all of that and yet none of those individual things.
Everything seems to me limited, shrunk, abortive in nature.
Man with his genius and his art is nothing but a miserable ape of something higher.
I would like to find beauty in the infinite and all I find there is doubt.
19
OH! THE INFINITE, THE INFINITE, that immense abyss, a spiral rising from the deepest depths right up to the highest regions of the unknown – an old idea in which we are all turning round and round, seized by vertigo – the abyss each person has at heart, an incommensurable abyss, a bottomless abyss.
In vain, for many days and nights on end, we will ask ourselves in our anguish: what is this word… God, eternity, the infinite? – and there we go round in circles, swept away by a wind of death, like the leaf blown along by the hurricane – it is as if the infinite then takes pleasure in lulling us ourselves in that immensity of doubt. And yet we always tell ourselves: after many centuries, after thousands of years, when everything has been worn out, there must be a limit there.
Alas, eternity rises before us and we are afraid of it – afraid of that thing which must last for such a long time, we who last for so little.
For such a long time!
Doubtless when the world no longer exists (how I would like to be alive then – living without nature or men – what grandeur in that void!), doubtless there will be darkness then – a little burnt ash which will have been the earth and perhaps a few drops of water – the sea.
Heavens! Nothing more – emptiness – only the void spread out across the vast expense like a shroud!
Eternity, eternity! Will it last for ever?… for ever, without end?
And yet what remains, the smallest scrap of the world’s debris, the last breath of a dying creation, the void itself, will necessarily be weary of existing. Everything will call for total destruction.
This idea of something without end makes us grow pale. – Alas! and we will be in it, all of us now living – and this immensity will sweep us along.
What will we be? A nothing – not even a breath of air.
I have long thought of the dead in their coffins, the protracted centuries they spend like that under the earth filled with rumours and cries, and they so calm, in their rotten wooden boxes, their gloomy silence interrupted, at times, either by a hair falling, or by a worm slithering by, over a shred of flesh. How they sleep there, lying silent – under the earth – under the flowering turf!
And yet, at wintertime, they must be cold under the snow.
Oh! if only they could awaken then – if they could come back to life and see all the tears with which their funeral sheets were bedewed now dried, all those sobs stifled – all those grimaces at an end. They would be filled with horror at this life that they bewailed as they left it – and they would quickly return to the nothingness so calm and so true.
To be sure it is possible to live, and even die, without having once asked oneself what life and death are.
But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind’s breath, the rivers meandering through the meadows, life twisting and turning and swirling through things, men living, doing good and evil, the sea rolling its waves and the sky with its expanse of lights, and who asks himself why these leaves are there, why the water flows, why life itself is such a terrible torrent plunging towards the boundless ocean of death in which it will lose itself, why men walk about, labour like ants, why the tempest, why the sky so pure and the earth so foul – these questions lead to a darkness from which there is no way out..
And doubt comes afterwards: it is… something that cannot be said but can be felt. Man then is like that traveller lost amid the sands searching everywhere for a route to lead him to the oasis but seeing only the desert.
Doubt is life – action, words, nature, death. Doubt is in it all.
Doubt is death for souls; it is a leprosy that seizes on worn-out races; it is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
Madness is the doubt of reason.
Perhaps it is reason.
Who can prove it one way or the other?
20
THERE ARE POETS WHOSE SOULS are filled with fragrance and flowers, who regard life as the daybreak of heaven, and others who are filled with nothing but darkness, bitterness and anger – there are painters who see everything in blue, others who see it all in yellow or all in black. Each of us has a prism through which we observe the world, happy is the one who can find cheerful colours and merry things in it.
There are men who see in the world nothing other than a title to be gained, or women, or the bank, a fine name, a destiny: follies.
I know some who can see only railways, markets or livestock. Some discern in it a sublime plan, others an obscene farce.
And the former would ask you what after all is the obscene? A difficult question to answer, like all questions.
I would just as much like to give the geometrical definition of a fine pair of boots or a beautiful woman, two things of great importance.
The people who see our globe as a big or small heap of mud are singular characters and difficult to pin down.
You come to talk with one of those despicable people, people who don’t call themselves philanthropists and won’t vote for the demolition of cathedrals, and are unafraid of being labelled reactionary Carlists.* But soon you stop short or confess that you have been beaten, for the former are unprincipled people, who consider virtue to be a mere word, and the world a piece of buffoonery. Hence they set out to consider everything from a sordid point of view, they smile in disdain at the most beautiful things, and when you talk to them about philanthropy they shrug and tell you that philanthropy is shown by contributing to a fund for the poor.
What a fine thing is a list of names in a newspaper!
What a strange thing is this diversity of opinions, of systems, of beliefs and of follies.
When you talk to certain people, they suddenly stop in dismay and ask you: What, you are going to deny that? You’re capable of doubting that? Can one revoke the plan of the universe and the duties of mankind? And if unfortunately your gaze has betrayed your soul’s dreams – they suddenly stop short and leave their logical victory there, like those children who, frightened by an imaginary ghost, shut their eyes and dare not peep.
Open your eyes – man, weak and yet full of pride, poor ant crawling with such effort across your speck of dust, you call yourself free and great, you respect yourself, you yourself so vile throughout your life, and derisively no doubt you hail your rotten and transient body – and then you think that such a fine life, hectically driven in this way between the scrap of pride that you call greatness and that sordid self-interest that is the essence of your society, will be crowned by immortality. Immortality for you, more lecherous than a monkey, and more savage than a tiger, and more creeping than a serpent – come on now! Make me a paradise for the monkey the tiger and the serpent, for lust cruelty baseness – a paradise for egotism, eternity for this dust, immortality for this nothingness!
You boast of being free, of being able to do what you call good and evil, doubtless so as to be
condemned all the more quickly, for what good could you ever do? Is there a single one of your gestures which is not stimulated by pride or calculated out of self-interest?
You, free! From your birth onwards you are subject to all the infirmities of your father, you receive with life the seed of all your vices, of your very stupidity, of all that will make you judge the world, yourself and all that surrounds you, in accordance with that term of comparison, that measure you carry within yourself. You are born with a narrow spirit, with ready-made ideas, or ideas that will be ready made for you, about good and evil. You will be told that one must love one’s father and look after him in his old age, you will do both and yet you didn’t need anyone to teach you to do it, did you? It is an innate virtue like the need to eat. While on the other side of the mountain where you were born your brother will be taught to kill his father when he is old, and he will kill him, for that, he thinks, is natural, and it was not necessary for anyone to teach him to do it. You will be brought up by people who tell you that you must be very careful not to love carnally your sister or your mother, while you are descended like everyone from an incest, for the first man and the first woman, they and their children, were brothers and sisters; while the sun sets on other peoples who regard incest as a virtue and parricide as a duty. Are you already free of the principles by which you will govern your behaviour, is it you who presides over your upbringing, is it you who chose to be born with a character happy or sad, consumptive or robust, gentle or savage, moral or depraved?
But first of all why were you born? Did you choose to be? Were you consulted on the matter? So you were born inevitably because your father, one day, returned from an orgy heated by wine and licentious chatter and your mother took advantage of this, setting in motion all those tricks of a woman impelled by the fleshly, bestial instincts given to her by nature when it gave her a soul, and she managed to arouse the man that prostitutes had been draining dry ever since his teens. Whatever you may be, you were to begin with something as dirty as saliva and more fetid than urine, then you underwent metamorphoses like a worm, and finally you came into the world, almost lifeless, crying, howling and shutting your eyes as if from hatred of that sun you called for so many times.
You are given something to eat. You grow and develop like the leaf – it is mere chance if the wind does not sweep you away early, for to how many things are you subject? To air, to fire, to light, to day, to night, to cold, to heat, to everything that surrounds you, everything that exists: all of this masters you, holds you in thrall. You love verdure and flowers, and you are sad when they wither, you love your dog, you weep when it dies, a spider comes towards you, you draw back in horror, you shudder sometimes at the sight of your shadow, and when your thought itself dives into the mysteries of nothingness, you are dismayed and you are afraid of doubt.
You say you are free and every day you act at the behest of a thousand things, you see a woman and you love her, you die of love for her: are you free to quieten that pulsing blood, to calm that burning head, to repress your heart, to pacify the ardour that devours you? Are you free of your thought? A thousand chains hold you back, a thousand stimuli drive you on, a thousand obstacles bring you to a halt. You see a man for the first time, one of his features shocks you, and all your life long you feel aversion for this man whom you would perhaps have felt the greatest affection for if he had not had such a big nose. You have a poor digestion and treat with brutality the person you would otherwise have greeted with benevolence. And from all these facts flow or are linked just as unavoidably other series of facts, whence others derive in turn.
Are you the creator of your physical and moral constitution? No. You could be in full control of it only if you had fashioned and modelled it as you pleased.
You call yourself free because you have a soul – firstly it is you who made this discovery that you cannot even define; an intimate voice says yes – firstly you are lying: a voice tells you that you are weak and you feel within yourself an immense void that you would like to fill with all the things you throw into it. Even if you thought you did have a soul, are you sure? Who told you? When having been torn apart by two opposing feelings, after a long period of hesitation and doubt, you incline towards one of the feelings, you believe you were the master of your choice. But to be master it would be necessary to have no inclination at all. Are you master enough to do good if a taste for evil has implanted itself in your heart, if you have been born with bad inclinations that have been fostered by your upbringing? And if you are virtuous, if you hold crime in horror, will you be able to do it? Are you free to do good or evil? Since it is the feeling for good that always controls you, you cannot do evil.
This battle is the struggle between two inclinations, and if you do evil it is because you are more depraved than virtuous and the stronger fever has gained the upper hand.
When two men fight, it is certain that the weaker, the least adroit and the least supple will be vanquished by the stronger, the most adroit and the most supple – however long the struggle lasts there will always be one who is vanquished. The same goes for your inner nature: even when what you feel to be good wins, is this always a victory for justice? Is what you judge good the absolute, immutable, eternal good?
All is thus darkness around man, all is empty and he would like something fixed – he himself spins through this vague immensity where he would like to find a firm footing – he clings to everything and everything fails him: fatherland, freedom, belief, God, virtue, he has seized it all and it has fallen from his hands – like a madman who drops a crystal vase and laughs at all the fragments he has made.
But man has an immortal soul made in God’s image – two ideas for which he has shed his blood, two ideas which he cannot understand: a soul – a God, but ideas of which he is convinced.
This soul is an essence around which our physical being rotates, as does the earth around the sun. This soul is noble, for being a spiritual principle, and not earthly, there cannot be anything low or base about it. And yet isn’t it thought that directs our bodies, isn’t it that which makes us lift our arms when we want to kill? Isn’t it thought that animates our flesh? Could it be that spirit is the principle of evil and the body its agent?
Let us see how this soul, this consciousness is elastic, flexible, how soft and pliable it is, how easily it crumples beneath the body that weighs down on it or leans on the body which obediently bows, how venal and base this soul is, how it creeps, how it flatters, how it lies, how it deceives. It is the soul that sells the body, the hand, the head and the tongue – it is the soul that craves blood and demands gold, forever insatiable and coveting everything in its infinite longings – it is in the midst of us, like a thirst, a kind of ardour, a fire devouring us, a pivot which forces us to rotate around it.
You are great! Man! Not by the body, doubtless, but by this spirit that has made you, so you say, the king of nature; you are great, masterful and strong.
Every day indeed you upturn the earth, you dig canals, you build palaces, you encase rivers in stone, you pick grass, you knead it and eat it, you stir the ocean with the keel of your vessels and you find all of that beautiful, you think yourself better than the wild beasts that you eat, freer than the leaf swept away by the winds, greater than the eagle who hovers over your towers, stronger than the earth from which you draw your bread and your diamonds and the ocean across which you sail, but alas! – the earth that you upturn returns to its place, your canals are destroyed, the rivers invade your fields and your cities, the stones of your palaces come apart and collapse under their own weight, ants scurry across your crowns and your thrones, all your fleets are unable to leave any more traces of their passage on the surface of the ocean than a drop of rain or a bird’s wing beat, and you yourself pass across that age-old ocean without leaving any more trace of yourself than your ship leaves on the waves. You think yourself great because you work without respite, but this work is a proof of your weakness – you were thus condemned t
o learn all these useless things in the sweat of your brow; you were a slave before birth, and wretched before you had begun to live. You look at the stars with a smile of pride because you have given them names, because you have calculated their distance as if you wanted to measure the infinite and enclose space within the bounds of your spirit. But you are wrong! Who tells you that behind these worlds of light there are not yet others infinite in number, and so on for ever? Your calculations come to an end perhaps at a height of a few feet, just where a new scale of things begins. Do you yourself understand the value of the words you use… expanse, space? They are vaster than you and your entire globe.
You are great and you die, like the dog and the ant, with more regret than they do, and then you rot, and I ask you, when the worms have eaten you, when your body has dissolved in the dankness of the tomb, and your dust is no more, where are you, man? Where even is your soul – that soul which was the driving force behind your actions, which delivered your heart up to hatred, to envy, to all the passions, this soul which sold you and made you commit so many base actions, where is it? Is there a place holy enough to receive it?
You respect yourself and honour yourself as a God – you have invented the idea of the dignity of man, an idea that nothing in nature could conceive at the sight of you, you desire to be honoured and you honour yourself; you even want this body so vile during its life to be honoured when it no longer exists. You want people to take off their hats out of respect for your human carcass – which is rotten with corruption, although it is even purer than you were when you were alive. That is your greatness.
Greatness of dust, majesty of nothingness!
Memoirs of a Madman and November Page 7