But as for me, who believed myself to be placed on a more elevated degree than those taciturn prisoners of terrestrial matter, what was my preparation for death? What was I even doing for the benefit of the last years of my life? I knew that the last part of a man’s life ought to be devoted to reaping what he has sown, transforming his past experiences into wisdom. Thus, having meditated on destiny, the best of humanity had prescribed. There was a time when it was necessary to renounce the pursuit of pleasure, in order in order devote oneself to the amelioration of the soul.
And the order of things, in its omnipotence, gave precise warnings that the time had come. The teeth broke. The hair turned white with an abrupt ardor. One sensed the dolor of unknown organs. It was like a clock chiming. Woe betide the man who made a semblance of not hearing it! Nothing happened to him. He continued to pursue pleasure. There was no visible punishment. No one chastised him. But there were the effects of ignorance and satisfied pleasure that one had allowed to develop in oneself, and those ineluctable effects were exercised on the man after death.
I knew that all those who had scrutinized the problem were in accord. It was necessary to renounce, to purify oneself, to try to understand. It was necessary to prepare to live in a world where forms have another appearance and where souls are naked. I knew that. I had repeated it to myself a hundred times. And yet, I was hastening along the road. I had just looked at my watch feverishly. I was afraid of being late.
I was not late. I had arrived at the place where the road bends and I suddenly saw the large eucalyptus, the wall of the park, and the little iron door. One might have thought that the eucalyptus had moved aside the bushes and smaller trees that evening in order to enjoy a more solitary reverie. And at the same moment, I saw the little iron door open, and I saw Roseline appear.
I had stopped, and at the place where I was, she could not see me. She darted a circular glance around the empty space around the old tree, and began to walk around it slowly.
In the gloom, I could only distinguish an oval face amid the blue silk of a headscarf, a supple white form in which the robe scarcely masked the movement of life. Ws it the charm of the solitary space, the fused light of the vanished day still trailing here and there? She had never seemed so delightful to me. In that romantic landscape she incarnated the heroines of whom I had once dreamed, the attraction of youth and amour. And she attracted it all the more because I could only perceive, alongside the whiteness of the eucalyptus, and uncertain and floating silhouette, like the idea that one has of beauty.
Then a force pulled me backwards. Without my being conscious that the movement had been determined by my will, I took a few steps silently along the road I had already traveled. Did that force issue from the depths of myself, or is it true, as so many souls secretly believe, that we are protected by certain invisible spirits that whisper to us, when the time comes, decisions that we obey without being able to explain their origin?
It was necessary for me to go back. No hesitation was possible. It was an order that came from I know not where.
I went back slowly, gripped by a great melancholy.
I am breaking the last link with the past. Now, I will not recommence again the comedy of pleasure to which the name of amour is given, with its infantile play-acting, its hopes, and its deceptive and charming joys. That pleasure I am losing, and it is suddenly clad in an almost heart-rending attraction. Perhaps that pleasure was puerile, and was only based on illusions, but I shall not find it again, either in this life or another. My hair will continue to thin, my features will hollow out, my shoulders will droop. I shall walk with my head slightly forwards, like all those for whom I once felt sorry, with a pity mingled with scorn, because I saw the visible appearances of old age in them. Never again will I find the quality of active delight of the man who wakes up in the morning with the assurance that he will see during the day a woman whom he thinks he loves. Never again will I feel the intoxication of the exchanged gaze, the squeezed hand of the creature who leans over in a movement of abandonment.
The road climbed a brief slope and then descended again. From the top of that slope one could see behind, through an opening in the trees, the place where the large eucalyptus was. The tree was imprinted with serenity and it seemed, with its open arms, in the tranquil night, to be invoking the gods appropriate to it.
Beside it, similarly white and leaning lightly against its wood, Roseline was standing. She seemed fluid, devoid of weight. At that distance, she was not distinguishable from another woman. She was a woman of the past, the symbol of all the women I had known, those I remembered and those I had forgotten. How charming her silhouette was, even from afar!
She was youth, my youth, which was no more than a shape, a distant form that was about to disappear into the shadow of the evening, and which no human or divine power could return to me, of which no Orpheus could go in search in the Underworld, which no Christ could resurrect.
Beauty, youth, you were under the eucalyptus, and I had to descend on the other side, along a slope where the pines were denser and the darkness thicker!
O my God, I am offering that which I loved the most to the invisible holocaust that demands from humans, without reason, the sacrifice of what is most dear to them.
The darkness did not appear to me to be thicker as I went down again in the midst of the densely-packed pines, and immediately, I had the sentiment that I was marching toward a new goal. Where I was going, I would not be alone. I was awaited.
There is a law of compensation that tends to return in another form that which has been lost. Beauty! Youth! But the spirit is rejuvenated eternally, if one has the will to do it. And there is no limit to the time to enjoy beauty. I had extracted myself from what is known as an amorous rendezvous, but I had another rendezvous in which there was no feminine face, no kiss, no ardor of the blood, where one could contemplate the radiant beauty of ideas.
I started walking rapidly. How much time I had lost! While walking, I had made a detour in order to follow a path from which the sea was visible. And suddenly, before me, there as a rapid circle of light, and then another. It was a flying spark, a little animate lamp. And I remembered the fireflies that Monsieur Spéluque had mentioned. They were multiplying around me. Some were skimming the ground, others were lost in the sky. All of them were, in fact, emerging from a dense thicket of wild bushes, a bouquet of mingled plants that I was skirting.
Was it the sudden warmth of the evening, the first burning breath of summer that was making the fireflies emerge in such large numbers, or was I seeing an intention of destiny, which was suddenly illuminating that corner of the world for me? Was not the evening of Pentecost the evening of the descent of the Spirit?
The path described a circle and came back toward my house. I perceived it with its tilted hat and its appearance of not standing upright. By virtue of a caprice of the wind, the agile flying insects seemed to be gathered around it. It was surrounded by a circle of living light, luminous droplets that were rising and falling, forming a spray and dispersing. And those flying wings seemed to be tracing signs in the blue of the sky. They were words in the language of the gods, which I did not understand, but which it was my prerogative to discover.
I traversed the shadow of the old pine at a rapid pace. I was in haste to return to the room where the books were.
And I thought that never, even in the most beautiful days of my twentieth year, had any amorous rendezvous procured me such a pure and profound pleasure.
THE DARK SIDE OF SOULS
THE DARK SIDE OF SOULS
A man sitting under his lamp in the evening can draw a great deal of consolation from stories of the lives of superior men. By searching here and there in those stories he can cause to spring forth, as in a faded mirror, certain lost reflections of great souls.
If one has just anxieties about immanent justice and divine bounty, one is marvelously comforted by the sentiment that others have experienced those anxieties. The solutions t
hey found were always insufficient and sometimes puerile, but what does it matter? One feels that one is joined by a community of preoccupations to a long chain of anxious men, and that is sufficient to ease the anxiety, or to give it a color of consolatory nobility, thanks to an indisputable antiquity. One is a little like those vain men who are proud to have ancestors who went to the crusades. One is proud of being part of a lineage that has sought Providence and has not found it, but has made other discoveries relative to the soul and the beauty of the world.
By studying the lives of superior men one finds that it is impossible to encounter in the relations of modern life, whatever effort one makes, examples of true benevolence, sadness for philosophical causes and high aspirations. But one is interested to observe that all great souls have a dark side. At some point they touch evil. One might think each has a black thread that binds him. And perhaps that is true, and it is because of that bond that those great souls are among us instead of being elsewhere. If they had broken it they would have disappeared from the earth and humankind would have had no further knowledge of them.
To be sure, it would be better, by virtue of a profound study of a life, to have a response to all the problems one has posed for oneself; but the most impassioning problems can only be resolved by oneself.
In the weaknesses of great men, in their contradictions, even in their cowardice, one sees a trace of humanity that is more moving than an excessively inaccessible grandeur.
When one has followed a great many of those beings who were believed to be perfect, when one has sat under the portals of philosophers, when one has marched alongside the cypresses with the sages, in the ineluctable dark side by which they are followed, one perceives that intellectual thought, even when it emanates from the highest genius, does not lead to anything much. There is a circle in which some go in one direction and others in the inverse direction: the sterile circle of reason. When one has gone around it several times, one has neither more truth nor more hope.
Only the mystics attain the spiritual reality with the fiery jet of their desire. They alone are instructive. And as one is tempted to imitate those who stimulate your admiration, one cannot help wondering what one can do to become a mystic—and that question is itself a portal to a new path.
Plato wanted to burn the books of Democritus that he had in his possession, in the hope of annihilating that philosopher’s work. It was necessary for two Pythagoreans who were present to represent to him that he would gain nothing, those works already being too widespread. He never named Democritus in his writings. Democritus was, however, the philosopher he should have cited most abundantly, in view of the fact that it was from him that he drew most frequently.
Diogenes hid a great bitterness under a philosophical bonhomie. The barrel was only a symbol of his affectation of simplicity. One day, at a dinner at which he was eating and drinking abundantly, he saw that Plato was contenting himself with olives. He almost had a fit of rage.
Aristotle, the substance of the thought of the Middle Ages, sustained philosophy and science through all the centuries that it is permitted to us to recapitulate, with an extraordinary pettiness of the soul. He took advantage of the old age of his master, Plato, to supplant him in the Academy of Athens. Throughout his life he sought important positions and obtained that of Preceptor of Alexandria. He mingled, by virtue of ambition, in all the quarrels of the Greek states. The historian Arrian accuses him of being one of those who poisoned Alexander. He was a pharmacist and had a great knowledge of poisons. His body had an inexplicable affinity with oil. He took baths in oil, which he then sold on to his clients, and even during the day, it was necessary that he had on his stomach a leather purse containing warm oil.
Socrates was too good a citizen. When civic virtues attain a certain exaggeration, they lower a man’s grandeur. The Athenians resolved one day, at the instigation of a warrior demagogue named Cleon, to take possession of the city of Amphipolis. There was then a pacifist party in Athens composed of sensate and just men. Socrates was not a member of that party. He was one of those who went to lay siege to Amphipolis. The inhabitants of that city, who were defending their liberty, defeated the Athenians. Socrates showed great courage, fighting hand to hand during the rout, taking no account of the fact that he was defending a bad cause. He showed the virtue of courage that one sees in history shared by millions of bellicose men, but is that what one has the right to demand of such a great sage? And is not courage, practiced thus, an immense diminution of veritable human virtue?
The seven sages of Greece! When those syllables resonate, one has an impression as profound as when one hears mention of the Rishis of India, the first initiators of humankind. There is a vague atmosphere of the marvelous around them. Now, we have a few details of the lives of those seven sages. Chilon, according to an inscription at the base of his statue, was the greatest of them. He was passionate about physical exercise, and also an excellent father. He died of joy on learning that his son had come first in a sporting contest.
Paternity and sport—is that really what one demands of an ideal type of humanity?
THE MEASURE OF SINCERITY
In what measure have those who have preached detachment been detached? Have those who have informed others of the reasons why humans ought to be consoled had an interior consolation themselves? And did that consolation came from a knowledge greater than the one they revealed in their writings for some reason of vanity, but to which they made some chosen disciple party? For there are moments of intimacy in which the noblest souls are invited by ambient influences of temperature and light to a sincerity and an absolute self abandonment.
Fortunate was the man who was able to chat familiarly with the Buddha when, in the evening, in the shade of a fig tree, after having taken the bowl of rice indispensable to the nourishment of the body, he forgot that life is dolor in order to contemplate the beauty of the stars.
Fortunate was the man who was a passenger on the same ship that brought Plato to Sicily and was able, when the rocks of Leucadia and Cephalonia appeared, to hear from his mouth before the calm sea the verities that could only be transmitted in speech!
But it is also possible that superior men flattered themselves with a peace that they did not possess in reality. Did they not hide, sometimes, in order to shed secret tears? How do we know whether the austere faces that we admire and want to take for an example were not masks, engraved every day for the naïve delight of disciples? Those sages, having once put their pride in the tranquility of their soul, were firmly obliged to defend that appearance until death, and against death.
It is the history of the sincerity of the masters of thought that it is necessary to believe. But we possess millions of details about men of action and almost none about philosophers or saints. For example, everything has been said about Napoléon and the Maréchals of the Empire, great killers of men and master horsemen, but we are not documented on the manner of death those who spent their lives meditating the problem of human destiny.
Perhaps it is better thus. The serenity of the final hour must be very difficult to attain and it is not certain that it is the wisest and the best-informed about the afterlife who are the most courageous.
But is it really a question of courage?
I was told recently that the man who was known as the master Philippe de Lyon,21 had retained after his death a face filled with anguish. Madame D., the author of remarkable works on the powers of the spirit and spiritualization of beings, spent the last fortnight of her life crying “Help!” and struggling against invisible forces by which she thought she was being attacked. It is, however, of her, out of all the people I have known in France, that I would have expected the most serene end.22
Have those who are believed to be the wisest, by virtue of a wisdom long practiced, repressed desires that will reappear at the last moment? Or, what is more disquieting to think, are they the most clairvoyant, and have they glimpsed something that frightens them? One might think th
at they were more apt than others to discover a world that they had so often scrutinized. But it is necessary to remember that many ordinary people have acquired in death a revelatory calm, an expression a thousand times more eloquent than any words, the reflection of a sudden, moving and blissful vision.
THE BRONZE SANDALS OF EMPEDOCLES
Austere, clad in white, slightly annoyed and threatening because of the possible projection of that annoyance, the philosophers of antiquity stand in the background of our intellectual life. One has more respect for them than love, and they are all Greeks, even when they are Romans or Sicilians.
Those philosophers have marched at my side during courses at school, they have accompanied me in life, they have been present in hotel rooms, and on promenades at the seaside. They had in their eyes the particular deadness that the gazes of busts have, and there loose robes contained the promise of an edifying and superior life. I knew that it would be necessary one day to put them in their place in definite centuries and that I would draw comfort from their grandeur of soul.
In fact, it is their weaknesses that are more comforting. When one is weighed down by certain faults and the difficulty that human nature has in modifying itself, one is satisfied and reassured to observe that the truly great men, indisputable models of humanity, have possessed faults to a high degree.
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