SOLITUDE

It is my love for the multitude that makes me fly from them. In

flying from them, I go on seeking them. Do not call me a misanthrope.

Misanthropes seek society and intercourse with people; they need them

in order to feed their hatred and disdain of them. Love can live upon

memories and hopes; hate needs present realities.

Let me, then, fly from society and take refuge in the quiet of the

country, seeking in the heart of it and within my own soul the company

of people.

Men only feel themselves really brothers when they hear one another

in the silence of things in the midst of solitude. The hushed moan of

your neighbour which reaches you through the wall that separates you

penetrates much more deeply into your heart than would all his laments

if he told you them to your face. I shall never forget a night that I

once spent at a watering-place, during the whole of which I was kept

awake by a very faint intermittent moaning--a moaning that seemed to

wish to stifle itself in order not to awaken those who were asleep,

a discreet and gentle moaning that came to me from the neighbouring

bedroom. That moaning, which came from I know not whom, had lost all

personality; it produced upon me the illusion of coming out of the

silence of the night itself, as if it were the silence or the night

that lamented, and there was even a moment when I dreamt that that

gentle lament rose to the surface from the depths of my own soul.

I left the following day without having sought to ascertain who was the

sufferer or why he suffered. And I believe that I have never felt so

much pity for any other man.

It is only solitude that dissolves that thick cloak of shame that

isolates us from one another; only in solitude do we find ourselves;

and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in

solitude. Solitude unites us, believe me, just as much as society

separates us. And if we do not know how to love one another, it is

because we do not know how to be alone.

It is only in solitude, when it has broken the thick crust of shame

that separates us from one another and separates us all from God, that

we have no secrets from God; only in solitude do we raise our heart to

the Heart of the Universe; only in solitude does the redeeming hymn of

supreme confession issue from our soul.

There is no other real dialogue than the dialogue that you hold with

yourself, and you can hold this dialogue only when you are alone. In

solitude and only in solitude can you know yourself as a neighbour;

and so long as you do not know yourself as a neighbour, you can never

hope to see in your neighbours other I’s. If you want to learn to love

others, withdraw into yourself.

* * * * *

I am accused of not caring about or being interested in the anxieties

of men. It is just the contrary. I am convinced that there is no more

than one anxiety, one and the same for all men, and never do I feel it

or understand it more deeply than when I am alone. Each day I believe

less and less in the social question, and in the political question,

and in the æsthetic question, and in the moral question, and in the

religious question, and in all the other questions that people have

invented in order that they shall not have to face resolutely the only

real question that exists--the human question, which is mine, yours,

his, everyone’s.

And as I know that you will say that I am playing with words and that

you will ask me what I mean by this human question, I shall have to

repeat it once again: The human question is the question of knowing

what is to become of my consciousness, of yours, of his, of everyone’s,

after each one of us has died. So long as we are not facing this

question, all that we are doing is simply making a noise so that we

shall not hear it. And that is why we fear solitude so much and seek

the company of one another.

* * * * *

The greatest thing that there is among men is a poet, a lyric poet,

that is to say a real poet. A poet is a man who keeps no secrets from

God in his heart, and who, in singing his griefs, his fears, his hopes

and his memories, purifies and purges them from all falsehood. His

songs are your songs, are my songs.

Have you ever heard any deeper, any more intimate, any more enduring

poetry than that of the Psalms? And the Psalms are meant for singing

alone. I know that they are sung by crowds, assembled together under

the same roof in religious services; but in singing them the crowd

ceases to be a crowd. In singing the Psalms, each one withdraws into

himself and the voices of others echo in his ears simply as the

consonance and reinforcement of his own voice.

And I observe this difference between a crowd assembled together to

sing the Psalms and a crowd assembled to see a drama or to hear an

orator: it is that the former is a real society, a company of living

souls, in which each one exists and subsists by himself, while the

other is a formless mass and each one of those who compose it no more

than a fragment of the human herd.

I have never felt any desire to move a crowd, to exercise influence

upon a mass of people--who lose their personality in being massed

together--and on the other hand I have always felt a furious desire to

perturb the heart of each individual man, to exercise an influence upon

each one of my brothers in humanity. Whenever I have spoken in public

I have almost always succeeded in employing a kind of lyrical oratory,

and I have endeavoured to force upon myself the illusion that I was

speaking to only one of my hearers, to any one, no matter which, to

each one, not to all of them _en masse_.

* * * * *

We men are impenetrable. Spirits, like solid bodies, can only

communicate with one another by the contact of surfaces, not by

penetrating one another, still less by fusing together.

You have heard me say a thousand times that most spirits seem to me

like crustaceans, with the bone outside and the flesh inside. And when

in some book that I have forgotten I read what a painful and terrible

thing it would be if the human spirit were to be incarnated in a crab

and had to make use of the crab’s senses, organs and members, I said to

myself: “This is what actually happens; we are all unfortunate crabs,

shut up in hard shells.”

And the poet is he whose flesh emerges from the shell, whose soul oozes

forth. And when, in our hours of anguish or joy, our soul oozes forth,

we are all of us poets.

And that is why I believe that it is necessary to agitate the masses,

to shake men and winnow them as in a sieve, to throw against one

another, in order to see if in this way their shells will not break

and their spirits flow forth, whether they will not mingle and unite

with one another, and whether the real collective spirit, the soul of

humanity, may not thus be welded together.

But the sad thing is, if we are to go by past experience, that all

these mutual rubbings and clashings, far from breaking the shells,

harden, thicken and enlarge them. They are like corns that grow larger

and stronger with rubbing. Although perhaps it is that the clashes are

not violent enough. And in any case it must be clashing, not rubbing. I

do not like to rub against people but to clash against them; I do not

like to approach people obliquely and glance off them at a tangent, but

to meet them frontally, and if possible split them in two. It is the

best service I can do them. And there is no better preparation for this

task than solitude.

It is very sad that we have to communicate with one another by

touching, at most by rubbing, through the medium of the hard shells

that isolate us from one another. And I am convinced that this hard

shell becomes weaker and more delicate, in solitude, until it changes

into the most tenuous membrane which permits of the action of osmosis

and exosmosis. And that is why I believe that it is solitude that makes

men really sociable and human.

* * * * *

There are two kinds of union: one by removing differences, separating

the elements that differentiate from those that unite, the other by

fusion, bringing these differences into agreement. If we take away from

the mind of each man that which is his own, that way of looking at

things that is peculiar to him, everything that he takes care to hide

for fear people should think him mad, we are left with that which he

has in common with everyone else, and this common element gives us that

wretched thing that is called common sense and which is nothing more

than the abstract of the practical intelligence. But if we fuse into

one the differing judgments of people, with all that they jealously

preserve, and bring their caprices, their oddities, their singularities

into agreement, we shall have human sense, which, in those who are rich

in it, is not common but private sense.

The best that occurs to men is that which occurs to them when they

are alone, that which they dare not confess, not only not to their

neighbour but very often not even to themselves, that which they fly

from, that which they imprison within themselves while it is in a state

of pure thought and before it can flower into words. And the solitary

is usually daring enough to express this, to allow it to flower, and

so it comes about that he speaks that which others think in solitude

by themselves and which nobody dares to publish. The solitary thinks

everything aloud, and surprises others by saying that which they

think beneath their breath, while they seek to deceive one another by

pretending to make them believe that they are thinking something else,

but without anybody believing them.

All this will help you to deduce for yourself in what way and to what

extent solitude is the great school of sociability, and how right it is

that we should sometimes withdraw ourselves from men in order that we

may the better serve them.