by Jean Bruller
We had taken a small, stony path between two freshly mown fields. Suddenly, and almost under our feet, a hare flushed and streaked along a furrow, straight as an arrow. I felt Sylva, quite close to me, give a violent start, and already I could see her galloping after the hare as she would have done only a few days ago; but her impulse seemed to collapse there and then or, more exactly, to melt and dissolve. She just gazed musingly after the disappearing hare, then turned her head away, and we continued our walk as if nothing had happened.
I was intrigued and said, “Why didn’t you run after him? He was a beautiful, big hare.”
She turned her head once more toward the clover field in which the animal had vanished, seemed to search it for an answer.
“Dunno,” she said at last. “Why run?”
“To catch it,” I said laughingly. “Wouldn’t you have liked that?”
She answered, “Yes.” Then, in a lower tone, she corrected herself: “No.” She shrugged her shoulders and repeated, “Dunno.” And she stared at me, her forehead puckered with a worried line, as if I could perhaps explain to her the strange indecision that had overcome her. Naturally, on the spur of the moment, I was quite incapable of it and we had walked on without saying anything.
Suddenly, right there in the train, I was given the answer! (Life is so often like that. An insignificant fact which might otherwise have completely escaped notice, is pounced upon by the mind that has been waiting for it.) Three ladies were standing in the corridor, chattering, their backs turned to me. An express train rushed past us. It made the windows bang like an explosion, and its whistle blast pierced my ears so brutally that I jumped. But in front of me, at the sudden “bang!” the ladies’ three backsides jumped too, like three big balls. All the rest of their bodies remained impassive and they continued their chatter without having noticed anything, without even being aware that their backsides had jumped half a foot high, as if their skirts had enclosed a jack-in-the-box or a frightened animal. The effect was extraordinarily comical but, above all, I suddenly realized that what had happened to Sylva, faced with her hare, was directly related, except that it was the exact opposite.
For what those independent bottoms showed when, at the sudden roar of the express train, they had tried to flee without even informing their owners’ brains, was how close to the crust of civilization there still survived the reflexes of the animal. Whereas Sylva’s sudden inhibition, which had abruptly checked the hunter’s instinct and suspended the reflex of the chase in full play, wasn’t this inhibition due to the birth of something rather remarkable: the absolutely novel surrender of those instincts to a still uncertain but evident form of reasoning will? What had been in those ladies’ bottoms a survival of ancient tropisms, was it not in my vixen, on the contrary, the beginning of their decline?
To be quite sure of it, we would naturally have to wait for a sufficient number of similar acts from Sylva. In the days that followed my return, I was happy to notice that there was indeed no lack of them. It was as if all along the line, her instincts, after the death of the dog, had effected a sort of general retreat. This was startling to watch, for, like all retreats, this one too proceeded in great disorder. Faced with the simplest stimulus, to which the fox-like reflexes would previously have responded instantly without the least hesitation, Sylva now seemed unsure and bewildered; sometimes she obeyed them in the end as she used to do, sometimes she seemed to reject them; in either case, the outcome for a long time remained unpredictable. And so it became increasingly clear that what was happening inside that mysterious skull ever since her little brain, shocked into activity by the tragic discovery of the human condition, had begun to function at a manifestly accelerated rhythm, was actually a kind of transfer of powers. Instinct, abandoning the premiership, was handing the government over to reason.
As the days passed, it became progressively evident that Sylva was ceasing to act on impulse by virtue of her automatisms, and beginning to act by choice in accordance with her preferences. And by the same stroke I realized for the first time that choice and automatism are mutually contradictory by definition. Any possibility of choice obviously excludes automatism (and farewell to instinct!) just as automatism necessarily excludes any possibility of choice (and farewell to reason!). A relentless dilemma! Was it conceivable that I had for so long been ignorant of such a self-evident truth? That’s the threshold, I told myself, the frontier that separates instinct from intelligence. Previously, like many animal-loving people, I had denied the existence of a definite borderline. What scatterbrains we are! The borderline is cut with a knife.
And so I discovered that, from the day of the hare onward, Sylva could never again obey all her impulses like a blind mechanism. Henceforth, I thought to myself, she would have to make up her mind herself. And in so doing she would lose one by one the automaton’s powers and precision, just as the human race has lost them. She would become hesitant, clumsy, she would take a hundred wrong turnings for one right one. With an almost anguished giddiness I realized in a flash of insight that this was a fatal, inevitable necessity; that it was part of the very essence of the human being. That to hope that one might acquire understanding and at the same time preserve one’s instinct was an absurd wish. That every conquest made by reason or by the will involves as a corollary the surrender of an innate but unconscious knowledge. And this relinquishment, I told myself, is the price we pay for our freedom.
As was indeed inevitable, Sylva’s indecision assumed greater proportions every day. Everything aroused in her an intense and absorbed attention. In many circumstances she behaved as she had when faced with the hare: a first instinctive movement, promptly checked as if to examine if that was really what she wanted to do. Of course she no longer knew what she really wanted, and more and more often she would mope in a kind of dreamy apathy. While this latter state aroused some anxiety in me, Nanny was delighted. At last, she said, she was on her home ground again, that of educating backward children. The sudden interest Sylva nowadays showed for all creatures and things around her, she also seemed to show, though still silently as a rule, for Nanny’s explanations. She would not say a word but some time later we would discover that she had grasped the gist. Nanny taught her to count on her fingers. Sylva watched her stretching them out one after the other, but she did not repeat the figures. Yet, while in the first days when we told her at lunch, “Go and fetch three apples,” she would bring us two or five at random, she eventually brought back the right number one day and never made a mistake again, whatever figure we mentioned.
I have said before that for a long time we were stumped by her inability to understand pictures, at least insofar as they represented animate beings, until she thought she recognized that of a motionless dog—the dead Baron. This revelation, as I have said, shook her violently (screams, gasps and sobs interspersed with the dog’s name) but simultaneously it seemed to have opened a door in this brain full of locks and bolts, onto a field with vast prospects; for on the next day all pictures had become intelligible for her and produced cries of pleasure.
Nanny gave her paper and pencil, showed her how to make use of them. To begin with, of course, her pupil only managed to scrawl at random, like a very small child. But the mere fact that she scribbled was already a remarkable novelty, and whenever some flourish happened to form a circle, she would exclaim, “An apple!” and laugh.
Indeed she now laughed more and more, thus confirming my own modest theories: it was death, I was certain of it, that had led her to laughter. It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace. An atavistic fear lies within us from our childhood, more or less unconscious and lurking in our depths, and when something delivers us from it for a fleeting second, it produces suddenly such a relief, lifts such a weight, that our body shakes with “brutal convulsions.” In laughter, in comedy, we seek a second’s respite, a short moment of organic oblivion from o
ur condition. During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal.
Sylva always laughed after being afraid. She also laughed—not always—after some unforeseen effect of her acts. To have drawn an apple unintentionally was one of those effects. In order to experience this pleasure, she began to draw them on purpose. Then she learned from Nanny that one could put into a circle two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and she started to draw funny figures endlessly with childish fervor. But she would draw them lying down.
“Why lying down?” Nanny asked her eventually, intrigued. “Bonny, no more play,” said my vixen, and she laughed and jumped at me jocosely, kissing and biting me to manifest her joy at my being alive.
I did not start writing this story to describe Mrs. Bumley’s methods of re-education. They were excellent and proved quick and effective. Sylva was soon able to recognize not only pictures but sounds. I mean printed vowels, then consonants, then groups of letters. When she understood that a cry, a word, could be represented, a new door opened onto a new domain, and through it abstract ideas rushed in. Notions such as time and space began to mean something to her. So the “but not for a long, long time” which a short while ago had been unable to soften the terrifying revelation that Baron’s death meant mine and hers as well—for in her mind which was still impervious to duration, still like a fox’s living in a perpetual present, this death in fact made us at once alive and dead—this “very long time” became comprehensible to her, the sinister prospect ceased to be imminent and even withdrew so far that she hardly ever referred to it. All that it left on her mind in process of formation was an indelible mark, a half-unconscious imprint, rarely expressed but which became the inner driving force of the mind’s progress just like the secret presence of the engines, silent and invisible, in the heart of a ship.
Chapter 30
IS there any need to go on? My aim, in starting this notebook, was to write the story of a metamorphosis. It is done. Reliable authors assure us that the human species is a schism: a piece of nature in revolt, vainly struggling from the time of its origin to lift the mask behind which is hidden all raison d’être. Had not my little vixen now taken the decisive step beyond which there is no return, had she not passed over entirely to the schismatics? What remained of her earlier state? Hardly a memory. She was henceforth human, to the very depths of her soul. Certainly it was up to us now to educate her, to “raise” her in every sense of the word—but from now on this would be above and beyond the transformation. The metamorphosis was accomplished.
So what could I relate other than the type of progress which a child could make in the hands of efficient educators? Dr. Sullivan had warned me at the time: “She will start putting questions, you’ll have your work cut out!” She had not started immediately—it had required a more formidable motive power than her self-recognition in a mirror. But now, good Lord! Everyone has known the kind of children who daze you with questions about everything and nothing. They are angels of self-restraint compared with what Sylva was during that time. With the aggravating difference that she had an adult brain and that one could not fob her off with the vague replies which seem to satisfy children. Yet her questions were of a thorny type and most embarrassing: “Why does one live? Why die?” Poor Baron’s death was still dimly reverberating on the direction her mind was taking, since her mind itself had in a way been “hatched out” by this shock. What Sylva wanted to know was nothing less than the beginning and end of things.
For all that had left her untroubled, unintrigued, as long as she still had a vixen’s mind, now filled her with a frightened awareness: Why the day, why the night? What is the sun? The moon? The stars? Where does the sky end? Until the day when she asked, “And why does one exist, all of this?”
Frankly, at the time, this decisive question struck me with its form rather than with its meaning: for the “one” certainly referred to Sylva herself, but so did just as certainly the “all of this” that followed. “One” and “All of this,” Sylva and the universe, thus still seemed confusedly mixed up in her mind; the schism was not yet very clearly marked. Besides, the tone of the question had not gone beyond a certain perplexity, or rather a sort of bewilderment in a strange new region full of disconcerting mazes, alarming horizons—it did not yet betray excitement, the first quiver of indignation, the foreboding of a boundless outrage. She did not yet suspect (how could she?) that she would not receive, would never receive, an answer to her question.
What finally severed her last links with her former nature and made the schism final and complete, was her hearing me admit that “why we exist, my poor sweet, is something I would gladly tell you, but unfortunately nobody knows.” And hearing me say it not once but ten times, because she refused to believe in spite of my explanations that to such a simple and obvious question there existed no enlightenment; because she thought for a long time that, for some inexplicable reason, I was hiding the truth from her. But then, oh, I remember her amazed little face, her mouth opening in incredulous suffocation, her eyes flashing with growing anger, I remember how violently she stamped her foot and snapped in an accusing voice that broke with a little sob:
“But then, why, one knows nothing!”
I had to agree that men indeed know nothing, that they are born, live and die in a profound mystery and that it is precisely the greatness of science to try and pierce it… She interrupted me with even greater violence:
“Why, what greatness? Why must one seek? Since one lives, one ought to know why. Why doesn’t one know? Is it on purpose? Are we prevented?”
I remained dumfounded, a little ashamed. It would be an understatement to say that I was startled by the shrewdness of this remark: it was a positive eye-opener. I am not one of those people who get bogged down in metaphysics; I have always accepted things as they are, with a matter-of-fact turn of mind that suits a man who lives close to the soil. And I told myself that this quaint thought which had come to my little human vixen, despite its air of obviousness, had never occurred to me. And I wondered whether there were many people who had put it so clearly—if there were even many scientists who would notice how primitive and cardinal it is at one and the same time: “Why doesn’t one know?” indeed? And why “are we prevented”? By Jove, wasn’t Sylva’s surprise, her anger, the keystone of everything—of all that makes up the nobility of the mind of man? But men have wandered astray amid the trees of innumerable questions and lost sight of the forest of interrogation that encompasses them all: why, for what end, has our brain been created so accomplished that it is able to grasp everything, and yet so weak that it knows nothing—neither what it is itself, nor the body which it controls, nor this universe from which they both emanate? And because my vixen had a perfectly new brain, one which had not had the time to become cluttered up with trees, she had knocked directly against the forest of this “why” which we hardly ever think of, though it is the most stupendous, the most inexplicable inconsistency of the human condition…
… And one which, if men had the least common sense, ought to guide all their deeds and all their thoughts. And which, from that day onward, did indeed guide Sylva’s efforts. She brought a constant, burning ardor to her endeavors to understand the meaning of the things that surrounded her. Nanny taught her to read in the Scriptures. Sylva plunged into them with passionate eagerness and curiosity. She made me think of a gaping gourd, parched with questions no less urgent for being often inarticulate, which suddenly receives a great stream of thirst-slaking water. It even made me squirm a little. I am a reasonably good Christian, but all the same I had an uneasy feeling that this smacked a little of sharp practice, of trickery. I could not help telling myself that starved for enlightenment as she was, she would have devoured with the same greed whatever food one offered her. I could see for myself, in its most primitive state, the violence of this fundamental craving and the consequent power of the priests who assuage it. I thought to myself that these priests, from time immemorial and in all persuasions, have actua
lly had it all their own way. I felt shaken in my own beliefs, although it is true that they had never been very vigorous.
I myself gave her natural history books to read and watched her—with some satisfaction, I confess—if not prefer these books to the Gospels proposed by Mrs. Bumley (all I held against her, in fact, was that she was a rather too rabid Papist), at least gradually devote more time to them. I also noticed that she too was subject to the phenomenon I have already mentioned, whereby she indirectly revealed to me how it operated with most people: progressively as her mind enriched itself, which means as it began to cope in detail with her ignorance, her fantastically diverse ignorance, she grew more remote from it in bulk, she lost sight of the outrage which had revolted her in the first place—men’s ignorance as such. And not only did she lose sight of it but, little by little, when I talked about it, it seemed to irritate her. As if for her too the trees were beginning to hide the wood, making her lose interest in it.
As fresh acquisitions made her discover ever new gaps in her knowledge, her curiosity was fired with zeal to fill them, but as these gaps concerned ever smaller details, her curiosity too operated within ever narrower limits. By a natural progression she became almost completely detached from the great ontological problem and devoted herself to ever more realistic and practical matters. For by discovering the tangible world abounding in acquired knowledge, defined objects, specified feelings, interpreted sensations, explained relationships, she lost her unease, her disquiet and, with disquiet, the feeling of that total ignorance which had so frightened her at first. In short, her mind passed, in next to no time, from the anguished fears of the Stone Age to the calm certainties of our modern British civilization.
This sudden aptitude of hers for rushing nonstop through the stages of man was one of my major surprises. I remembered how much time it had taken my sweet little vixen in human shape to pass from her animal night to the first feeble light of dawn. It had taken her many months, almost a year. Whereas since that still quite recent day when she had discovered herself as being both existent and mortal, a few weeks had been enough to throw her mind wide open to a wealth of knowledge, and some of it remarkably subtle. Just as the water in a reservoir will undermine a rock for years, though nothing shows, nothing stirs, until there is a tiny landslip, a few inches only, then the dam bursts and the water rushes forth irresistibly.