I could see other people living, but with a life different from mine: some believed, others denied, others doubted, yet others didn’t bother their heads with any of all this and just attended to their business, in other words sold their wares in their shops, wrote their books, or expostulated from their pulpits; this was “mankind”, as they call it, a restless surge of wicked, cowardly, idiotic and ugly men. And I was part of the crowd, like a piece of seaweed swept along by the ocean, lost in the midst of the numberless waves that rolled and roared on every side around me.
I would like to have been an emperor, for the sake of his absolute power, his many slaves and his armies, all filled with delirious dedication to him; I would like to have been a woman for the sake of her beauty, to be able to admire myself, strip myself naked, let my hair fall down to my heels and gaze on my reflection in the streams. I would lose myself whenever I wanted in boundless daydreams; I imagined I was participating in splendid ancient festivities, a king of the Indies out hunting on a white elephant, watching Ionian dances, listening to the Greek waves plashing on the steps of a temple, listening to the night breezes in the oleanders of my gardens and taking flight with Cleopatra on my ancient galley. Ah! What madness! Woe betide the gleaner as she abandons her task and raises her head to see the berlin carriages rumbling down the highway! When she settles back to work, she will dream of cashmere and the love of princes, she won’t be able to find a single ear of corn, and will return home without having gathered her sheaf.
It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practising it, grabbing one’s share of the common cake, eating it and saying “It’s delicious!” rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead.
Perhaps that’s the reason why I thought I was a poet; none of the requisite miseries was lacking, as – alas! – you can see. Yes, once upon a time I thought I had genius, I strode along with my head crammed with magnificent thoughts, style flowed from my pen as easily as the blood flowed through my veins; at the least brush with beauty, a pure melody would rise within me, like those aerial voices, those sounds formed by the wind that waft from the mountains; human passions would have vibrated in marvellous sympathy if I had only touched them, my head was full of dramas all ready and waiting, with many scenes of furious passion and repressed anguish; from the child in its cradle to the dead man in his coffin, humanity echoed within me; sometimes gigantic ideas would dart across my mind like those great mute flashes of summer lightning that illuminate a whole city, with all the details of its buildings and all its street corners and crossroads. I was shaken and dazzled; but when I discovered that other people had already had the same thoughts, and expressed them in the very same way that I had conceived for them, I promptly fell into a bottomless slough of discouragement; I had imagined myself to be their equal, and I was merely their copyist! Thereupon I would pass from the intoxication of genius to the desolate sense of mediocrity, with all the rage of dethroned kings and all the torments of shame. There were days on which I would have sworn I was born for the Muse, while at other times I felt I was practically an idiot; and, constantly passing in this way from such heights to such depths, I ended up, like everyone who has been both rich and poor many times in his life, being and remaining thoroughly wretched.
Throughout that time, each morning as I awoke it seemed to me that some great event was about to occur that very day; my heart was big with hope, as if I had been expecting a cargo of happiness to come in from some distant land; but as the day went by my morale would sink; at dusk, in particular, I clearly saw that nothing would ever come. Finally, night fell and I went to bed.
Plaintive harmonies arose between physical nature and myself. How my heart would contract when the wind whistled through the keyholes, when the street lamps shed their light on the snow, when I heard the dogs howling at the moon!
I could see nothing to which I could cling, either society or solitude, poetry, knowledge, impiety or religion; I wandered round amidst them all, like the souls which hell has rejected and which paradise disdains. Then I would fold my arms, regarding myself as a dead man; I was now nothing but a mummy embalmed in my sorrow; fate, which had weighed down on me since my youth, now extended to the entire world; I could see it active and manifest in all human actions, just as universally as the sun shining over the earth’s surface; fate became a dreadful deity, which I adored as the Indians adore the mobile colossus that rolls over their bellies.* I wallowed in my gloom, which I now did not even try to evade; indeed, I savoured it, with the despairing joy of the patient scratching his wound and laughing when he sees the blood on his fingernails.
I was seized by a nameless rage against life, against men, against everything. My heart was a treasure house of tenderness, and yet I became fiercer than tigers; I longed to annihilate creation and join it in an endless slumber of nothingness – if only I could have awoken to see the flames of sacked cities! I yearned to hear the cracking of bones in the crackling fire, to cross rivers clogged with corpses, to gallop over entire subjugated peoples and crush them beneath my horse’s hooves – to be Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nero, able to shed terror across the world with a mere frown.
The more exultant and visionary I became, the more I shut myself away and turned inward. My heart dried up long ago, nothing new ever enters it now, it’s as empty as the tombs in which the dead have rotted away. I had grown to hate the sun, I was exasperated by the sound of rivers and the sight of woods, nothing seemed to me more utterly inane than the countryside; everything became melancholy and insignificant, I lived in a perpetual twilight.
Sometimes I would ask myself if I wasn’t mistaken; I would consider my youth and my future, but what a pitiful youth, and what an empty future!
When I wanted to stop brooding over the spectacle of my own misery and turn my gaze out to the world, what I could see of it was howls, cries, tears, convulsions – the same old play being put on again and again by the same old actors. “To think that there are people who study it all,” I said to myself, “and who settle back down to work every morning!” Only some great love might have rescued me from my plight, but I regarded that as a thing not of this world, and I bitterly regretted the loss of all the happiness I had dreamt of.
Then death appeared to me in all its allure. I have always loved death; as a child, I longed for it simply so as to know it, to find out what lies within the grave, and in that sleep what dreams may come; I remember how I would often scrape the verdigris off old coins to poison myself, or try to swallow pins, or go to an attic window to hurl myself down into the street… When I reflect that almost all children do likewise and play at suicide, I can’t help but think that man, whatever he may say, has a raging love for death. He gives to death all that he creates, he emerges from it and returns to it, he does nothing but dream of it all his life long, he contains its seeds within his body, and he harbours a yearning for it within his heart.
It is so pleasant to imagine that you no longer exist! It is so peaceful in cemeteries! There, as you lie full length, wrapped in your shroud, your arms crossed on your breast, the centuries pass by and no more awaken you than does the wind as it passes over the grass. How often have I stood in cathedral chapels gazing at those long stone statues lying on their tombs! Their calm is so profound that life here below has nothing like it to offer; on their cold lips there seems to hover a smile that has risen from the depths of the grave; they look as if they were asleep and savouring dea
th. To have no more cause for tears, to have experienced the last of those breakdowns when it seems that everything is cracking up like worm-eaten scaffolding – that is the happiness above all other happiness, the joy that needs no tomorrow, the dream that has no awakening. And then, perhaps, we go into a better world, beyond the stars, where we live on the life of light and fragrance; perhaps we are a part of the odour of roses and the freshness of meadows! Ah, no, no! I prefer to think that we are quite dead, that nothing emerges from the coffin; and if we must still experience anything, let it be our own nothingness, let death feed on itself and admire itself; just enough life to sense that we have ceased to be.
And I would climb to the tops of towers, I would lean over the abyss, I would wait as the vertigo mounted; I had an indescribable longing to fling myself off, to fly through the air, to evaporate into the winds; I would gaze at the points of daggers and the muzzles of pistols, I would put them to my forehead, and grow accustomed to the contact of their cold sharp edge; on other occasions I would watch as wagoners turned round street corners and the huge wide wheels crushed the dust on the paving, reflecting that my head would be well and truly crushed underneath them as the horses trotted along. But I didn’t want to be buried – the coffin terrifies me; I’d rather be laid on a bed of dried leaves, in the depths of the woods, so that my body could be gradually dispersed by the beaks of birds and the heavy showers of rain.
One day, in Paris, I was hanging around on the Pont-Neuf; it was winter, the Seine was full of drift ice, great round blocks of ice slowly floated along with the current and crashed together under the arches; the river water was greenish-hued, and I thought of all those who had come here to end it all. How many people had passed by the place where I now was, rushing along head first towards love or business affairs, only to return, one day, walking slowly and shakily, trembling at the approach of death! They went over to the parapet, they climbed up, and jumped. Oh, how much misery has ended here, and how much happiness begun! What a cold, damp grave! How it opens wide to receive all comers! How many there are in it! There they all are, in the depths, rolling slowly along with their contorted faces and their limbs blue with cold; each of these glacial waves bears them away as they slumber, and carries them gently down to sea.
Sometimes old men would cast envious glances at me, telling me I was lucky to be young, that this was the best age to be; their hollow eyes admired my white brow, they remembered their love affairs and told me all about them; but I often asked myself whether, in their day, life hadn’t been more splendid, and since I couldn’t see anything to envy in myself, I felt jealous at their nostalgia, since it concealed a happiness I had never known. And then I had all the pitiable quirks of a man in second childhood! I would laugh softly to myself, for hardly any reason at all, like people convalescing. Sometimes I would be overwhelmed by tenderness for my dog, and I would give him a big hug; or I’d go and look at some old school clothes in a cupboard, and think of the day I’d first worn them, the places they had been with me, and I would lose myself in memories of all my bygone days. For memories can be sweet, sad or cheerful – what difference does it make! Indeed, the most melancholy ones are the most delectable – do they not contain the infinite? We can sometimes spend centuries in exhaustive recollection of a certain hour that will never return, that has passed, that has for ever ceased to exist, and that we would gladly give our whole future to get back.
But those memories are flaming torches arranged here and there in some great dim hall, gleaming in the murk; only by their glimmer can you see anything at all; what is near them is brightly lit, while everything else is darker, covered over with shadows and gloom.
Before going any further, I need to tell you the following story.
I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but during one vacation I woke up in a good mood and looked out of the window. Day was dawning, the great white moon was rising up into the sky; between the steep-rounded hills, grey and pink wisps of vapour rose in a gentle haze and melded into the air; the hens in the yard were clucking. Behind the house, along the path that leads out to the fields, I heard a wagon pass by, its wheels rumbling and scraping through the ruts; it was the gleaners setting off to work. There was dew on the hedgerows, the sun was shining down from the sky, you could smell the water and the grass.
I left the house and headed for X—; I had three leagues to cover, and set off alone, without a stick, without a dog. First I walked along the paths that wind between the fields of wheat, and under the apple trees, along the hedgerows; I didn’t have a thought in my head, I just listened to the sound of my own footsteps, and the rhythm of my movements rocked my musings. I was free, silent and calm, the weather was warm; from time to time I would stop; the pulse was beating in my temples, the crickets were chirping in the stubble; then I set off again. I came to a hamlet where there was nobody around, the yards were silent – it was a Sunday, I believe – the cows, sitting in the grass, in the shadow of the trees, were ruminating tranquilly, flicking their ears to chase away the midges. I remember walking along a path where a stream was flowing over pebbles, and green lizards and insects with golden wings slowly came up along the edges of the sunken road that was overgrown with foliage.
Then I found myself on a plateau in a mown field; I had the sea ahead of me, it was bright blue, the sun shed over it a profusion of gleaming pearls, and furrows of fire ran through the waves; between the azure sky and the darker blue of the sea the horizon shone in flaming splendour; the vault of the heavens rose over my head and then sank behind the waves that rose up to meet it as if to close the circle of an invisible infinitude. I lay down in a furrow and gazed at the sky, lost in the contemplation of its beauty.
The field I found myself in was a wheat field; I could hear quails winging round me and darting down onto clods of earth; the sea was calm, and murmured more like a sigh than a voice; the sun itself seemed to be making its own sound, it flooded everything, its rays burnt my limbs, the earth mirrored its heat back to me, I was drenched in its light, I shut my eyes and could still see it. The smell of the waves rose all the way up to me, with the odour of kelp and marine plants; sometimes the waves seemed to stand still, or else they came to expire soundlessly on the foam-festooned shore, like lips giving a mute kiss. Then, in the silence between two waves, while the swelling ocean was quiet, I listened for a moment to the song of the quails, then the noise of the waves began again, and after that the noise of the birds.
I ran down to the seashore, across the mass of fallen rocks over which I leapt sure-footedly; I raised my head in pride, and boldly breathed in the fresh breeze that was drying my sweat-drenched hair; the spirit of God filled me, I felt my heart swell, and some strange impulse of adoration seized me; I longed to be absorbed in the sunlight and lose myself in that azure immensity, with the odour that arose from the surface of the waves; and then I was overwhelmed by a delirious joy, and I started to walk as if all the bliss of heaven had entered into my soul. As the cliff formed a promontory just here, the whole coast disappeared and I could see nothing but the sea: its breakers swept up over the pebbles to my feet, and foamed on the rocks that just broke the surface, beating rhythmically against them, enfolding them as if with liquid arms or a transparent film, then falling back again, lit up by a blue sheen; the wind blew up flecks of foam around me and stirred the surface of the rock pools that had formed in the hollows of the stones, the kelp wept and rocked up and down, still driven along by the momentum of the wave that had deposited it there; from time to time, a seagull would pass over with a vigorous beat of its wings, and soar up to the cliff top. As the sea withdrew, and its roar also diminished like a refrain fading away, the shore came closer, leaving open to view on the sand the furrows that the wave had traced. And then I understood all the happiness of creation and all the joy that God has prepared in it for mankind; nature seemed to me as beautiful as a complete harmony audible only to an ecstatic ear; I sensed something as tender as love and as pure as prayer
rising from the depths of the horizon, and sweeping down from the heights of heaven to the tops of the ragged rocks; from the roar of the ocean and the light of day, something exquisite took shape, which I made my own as if it were a celestial domain; I felt myself to be really alive, happy and great, like the eagle who can stare at the sun and soar up into its beams.
Then everything seemed to me beautiful on earth, where I could see nothing disparate or bad; I loved everything, even the stones that jagged against my feet, even the sharp rocks on which I leant my hands, even that insensible nature that I imagined as hearing and loving me. And then I reflected how lovely it was, in the evening, to fall to one’s knees and sing canticles at the foot of a Madonna shining in the candlelight, and to love the Virgin Mary, who appears to sailors, in a corner of the sky, holding the sweet child Jesus in her arms.
Then it was all over. All too soon I remembered that I was alive; I came back to my senses and started to walk away, sensing that I was again falling prey to the curse, returning to the human state; life had come back to me, as if to numbed and frozen limbs, as a sensation of suffering; and just as I had been filled with an unutterable happiness, I now fell into an indescribable depression, and I went to X—.
I came back home that evening, passing through the same paths; I spotted the tracks I had left on the sand and the place where I had lain down in the grass; it was as if I had dreamt it all. There are days on which you live twice over, the second existence being nothing but the memory of the first, and I kept coming to a halt in my path, facing a bush, a tree, a corner of the road, as if at that spot, that very morning, some great event in my life had taken place.
When I reached home, it was almost night; they’d shut the doors, and the dogs all started to bark.
Memoirs of a Madman and November Page 12