I was alone. It was late at
night, and I was sitting at my table. My lamp
was buzzing like summer in the fields. I lifted
my eyes. The stars studded the heavens above.
The city was plunged at my feet. The horizon
escaped from nearby into eternity. The lights
and shadows formed an infinite sphere around me.
I was not at ease that night.
I was a prey to an immense distress. I sat
as if I had fallen into my chair. As on the first
day I looked at my reflection in the glass, and all
I could do was just what I had done then, simply cry,
“I!”
I wanted to know the secret of life.
I had seen men, groups, deeds, faces. In the
twilight I had seen the tremulous eyes of beings as
deep as wells. I had seen the mouth that said
in a burst of glory, “I am more sensitive than
others.” I had seen the struggle to love
and make one’s self understood, the refusal
of two persons in conversation to give themselves
to each other, the coming together of two lovers, the
lovers with an infectious smile, who are lovers in
name only, who bury themselves in kisses, who press
wound to wound to cure themselves, between whom there
is really no attachment, and who, in spite of their
ecstasy deriving light from shadow, are strangers as
much as the sun and the moon are strangers.
I had heard those who could find no crumb of peace
except in the confession of their shameful misery,
and I had seen faces pale and red-eyed from crying.
I wanted to grasp it all at the same time.
All the truths taken together make only one truth.
I had had to wait until that day to learn this simple
thing. It was this truth of truths which I needed.
Not because of my love of mankind.
It is not true that we love mankind. No one
ever has loved, does love, or will love mankind.
It was for myself, solely for myself, that I sought
to attain the full truth, which is above emotion,
above peace, even above life, like a sort of death.
I wanted to derive guidance from it, a faith.
I wanted to use it for my own good.
I went over the things I had seen
since living in the boarding-house. They were
so numerous that I had become a stranger to myself.
I scarcely had a name any more. I fairly listened
to the memory of them, and in supreme concentration
I tried to see and understand what I was. It
would be so beautiful to know who I was.
I thought of all those wise men, poets,
artists before me who had suffered, wept, and smiled
on the road to truth. I thought of the Latin
poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing
them truth as unveiled as a statue. A fragment
of his prelude came to my mind, learned long ago,
then dismissed and lost like almost everything that
I had taken the pains to learn up till then.
He said he kept watch in the serene nights to find
the words, the poem in which to convey to men the
ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand
years men have always had to be reassured and consoled.
For two thousand years I have had to be delivered.
Nothing has changed the surface of things. The
teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of
things, and would not even if men had not ruined His
teachings so that they can no longer follow them honestly.
Will the great poet come who shall settle the boundaries
of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will
be, not a fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise
man, the great inexorable poet? I do not know,
although the lofty words of the man who died in the
boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming
and the right to adore him already.
But what about me-me, who
am only a glance from the eye of destiny? I
am like a poet on the threshold of a work, an accursed,
sterile poet who will leave no glory behind, to whom
chance lent the truth that genius would have
given him, a frail work which will pass away
with me, mortal and sealed to others like myself,
but a sublime work nevertheless, which will show the
essential outlines of life and relate the drama of
dramas.
What am I? I am the desire not
to die. I have always been impelled-
not that evening alone-by the need to construct
the solid, powerful dream that I shall never leave
again. We are all, always, the desire not to
die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied
as life’s complexity, but at bottom this is
what it is: To continue to be, to be
more and more, to develop and to endure. All
the force we have, all our energy and clearness of
mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another.
We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new
sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what
we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity
is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of
death. That is what it is. I have seen
it myself. Instinctive movements, untrammelled
utterances always tend the same way, and the most
dissimilar utterances are all alike.
But afterwards! Where are the
words that will light the way? What is humanity
in the world, and what is the world?
Everything is within me, and there
are no judges, and there are no boundaries and no
limits to me. The de profundis, the effort
not to die, the fall of desire with its soaring cry,
all this has not stopped. It is part of the immense
liberty which the incessant mechanism of the human
heart exercises (always something different, always!).
And its expansion is so great that death itself is
effaced by it. For how could I imagine my death,
except by going outside of myself, and looking at
myself as if I were not I but somebody else?
We do not die. Each human being
is alone in the world. It seems absurd, contradictory
to say this, and yet it is so. But there are
many human beings like me. No, we cannot say
that. In saying that, we set ourselves outside
the truth in a kind of abstraction. All we can
say is: I am alone.
And that is why we do not die.
Once, bowed in the evening light,
the dead man had said, “After my death, life
will continue. Every detail in the world will
continue to occupy the same place quietly. All
the traces of my passing will die little by little,
and the void I leave behind will be filled once more.”
He was mistaken in saying so.
He carried all the truth with him. Yet we,
we saw him die. He was dead for us, but
not for himself. I feel there is a fearfully
difficult truth here which we must get, a formidable
contradiction. But I hold on to the two ends
of it, groping to find out what formless language
will translate it. Something like this:
“Every human being is the whole truth.”
I return to what I heard. We do not die since
we are alone. It is the others who die.
And this sentence, which comes to my lips tremulously,
at once baleful and beaming with light, announces
that death is a false god.
But what of the others? Granted
that I have the great wisdom to rid myself of the
haunting dread of my own death, there remains the death
of others and the death of so many feelings and so
much sweetness. It is not the conception of
truth that will change sorrow. Sorrow, like
joy, is absolute.
And yet! The infinite grandeur
of our misery becomes confused with glory and almost
with happiness, with cold haughty happiness.
Was it out of pride or joy that I began to smile when
the first white streaks of dawn turned my lamp pale
and I saw I was alone in the universe?