might have recognized in the harmony of this principle of independent
existence (with its main idea common to all and its expression so
varied) a faith similar to that in the Word, which implies a vow--the
voluntary restitution of breath to its divine Source. For every
creature, born of the impression of Divine Unity upon indeterminate
matter, is the very acknowledgment that he makes to his Creator, and
the expression of the nothingness from which he has been drawn. This
is the living, breathing rhythm of the world; where Man, dowered with
consciousness and language, has been instituted their priest, to make
dedication and offering of them,--and, of his own nothingness united to
essential grace, to make a filial gift of himself, through love’s most
intimate choice.
But these blind eyes refused to recognize unconditional being; and to
him whom they call Buddha was it given to perfect the Pagan blasphemy.
To return to this comparison of the Word; from the moment that they
ignored the object of the discourse, its order and sequence escaped
them entirely, and nothing remained but the ravings of delirium.
But a horror of that which is not the Absolute is essential to man;
and to escape the frightful circle of your vanity, Buddha, you have
not hesitated to embrace Nothingness! For instead of explaining all
things by their final end, he searched in himself for their intrinsic
principle; and, finding there only nothingness, his doctrine teaches
this monstrous communion.
This is the method; that the Sage,--having banished successively from
his mind the ideas of form and of space, and the very idea of an
idea,--arrives finally at Nothingness, and so enters into Nirvana. And
people are awed by this revelation! As for me, I find that to the idea
of Nothingness they have added that of Enjoyment. This seems to me the
last and most Satanic mystery; the silence of a creature intrenched
in its final refusal, the incestuous quietude of a soul seated on its
integral difference!
THE SEDENTARY
I live in a corner of the highest story of a square and spacious
building. I have placed my bed in the embrasure of the window; and
when the evening, like the bride of a god, silently mounts her couch,
I lie at full length with my face turned toward the night. From time
to time, lifting an eyelid heavy as if in death, my sight has swum in
a rose-colored glow. But at this hour, emerging with a long sigh from
a sleep as heavy as Adam’s, I awaken to a vision of gold. The light
tissue of the mosquito netting waves under an ineffable breeze. Here
is light purged of heat; and I twist slowly in the delicious coolness.
If I put out my bare arm, it seems to me fitting to plunge it to the
shoulder in the consistency of this glory, to sink my hand searchingly
into the fountain of eternity, as tremulous as its source. I see the
magnificent lake of light spread with an irresistible intensity in
a sky that is like a concave and liquid basin the color of mulberry
leaves. Only the face of the sun, and its insupportable fires, only the
mortal thrust of its rays, can drive me from my bed. I foresee that I
shall have to pass the day in fasting and detachment. What water will
be pure enough to quench my thirst, to satisfy my heart? From what
manner of fruit shall I strip the skin with a golden knife?
But when the sun has reached the zenith, followed by the sea as
is a shepherd, and by the races of mankind arising in successive
multitudes,--it is noon, and everything that occupies a dimension
in space is enveloped by the soul of a fire whiter than lightning.
The world is effaced and the seals of the furnace broken; all things
have vanished in the heart of this new deluge. I have closed all the
windows. Prisoner of the light, I take up the journal of my captivity.
And now, with my hand on the paper, I write by the same impulse that
moves the silkworm, who spins its thread of the leaf that it devours.
Sometimes I stroll through the darkened room, through the dining-room
or the parlor; or for a moment I rest my hand on the cover of the
organ, in this bare space whose center the work-table fills, standing
intrepid and alone. Surrounded by these white streaks that mark the
fissures in my prison, I develop the thought of holocaust. Ah, if
it is enviable to dissolve in a flaming embrace, swept away upon a
whirlwind with vehement breath,--how much more beautiful the torture of
a spirit devoured by light!
And, when the afternoon is filled with this burning softness, by which
the evening is preceded, like the sentiment of paternal love; having
purified my body and my mind, I remount to the highest room. Seizing an
inexhaustible book, I pursue there the study of Being, the definition
of person and substance, of qualities and possibilities.
Between two rows of houses, the glimpse of a river terminates my
street; the enormous silver current smokes, and great ships with white
sails move across the splendid gap with a smooth and superb grace. I
see before me the very River of Life whose image I borrowed when a
child, to discourse of Morality. But today, stubborn swimmer though
I am, I no longer cherish any hope of landing flat on my face among
the reeds in the slime of the other bank, under the salutation of the
palms, in a silence interrupted only by the cry of a parrot. Although
the shrill cascade invites me, drumming upon the gravel behind the
fleshy foliage of the magnolia; although the fabulous boughs are
bending beneath their weight of myrobalans and of pomegranates; I will
think of them no more--turning my glance to a more angelic science, to
this mystic garden which is offered for my enjoyment and my recreation!
THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA
Arriving from the horizon, our ship is confronted by the wharf of the
Earth; and the continent, emerging, spreads its immense architecture
out before us. In the morning distinguished by one great star, as I
mount the gangway the earth’s blue apparition appears before my eyes.
To defend the sun against the pursuit of the restless ocean, this
continent has established the deep-set solidity of its ramparts. Their
breaches open into a happy countryside.
For a long time in the full daylight we follow the frontier of another
world. Carried along by the trade-winds, our ship veers and rebounds
upon the resilient abyss to which it confides its whole weight. I am
caught up to the Azure, I am stuck there like a cask. Captive of the
infinite, suspended at the intersection of sky and water, I see below
me all the somber Earth laid out like a chart--the whole world, humble
and enormous! My separation from it is irrevocable. All things are far
from me, and only sight connects me with them. It will never again be
vouch-safed me to set my foot on the solid earth, to construct with my
hands a dwelling of wood and stone, to eat in peace food cooked at the
domestic fire. Soon we will turn our prow toward the shoreless sea;
and, under an immense spread of sail, our advance into the midst of
eternity will be shown only by our signal lights.
SALUTATION
And again I am permitted to salute this land similar to Gessen and
Canaan. Tonight, as our ship tossed in the wheat-colored moonlight,
at the entrance to the river, what a sign the Dog-Star was to me, low
beyond the sea; the golden watchman at the foot of a stretch of stars,
glowing splendor at the far horizon! These flowing waters having led us
into the heart of the countryside, I disembark, and on my road I see
below me the image of the round sun repeated in the fields, ruddy in
the green rice.
It is neither cold, nor too warm. All nature has the warmth of my body.
How the feeble cry of these crickets touches me! At this end of the
season, in this testamentary moment, the union of the sky and the earth
(less sacramental today than it is amorous) consummates the matrimonial
solemnity.
O cruel destiny! Is repose always apart from me? Is there no peace for
the heart of man? A spirit born for one only joy can pardon no delay.
Absolute possession some day will not dry my tears! No joy of mine
will be sufficient to make reparation for the bitterness of this grief.
And I will salute this earth; not only with a frivolous jet of
intricate phrases, but with the sudden discovery in me of an immense
discourse circling the foot of the mountain like that sea of wheat
crossed by a triple river. Like that plain and its roads, I fill the
space between the mountains. With both eyes lifted toward the eternal
mountains, I salute the venerable body of the earth. Through the air
I no longer see its mere semblance, but its very flank, the gigantic
assemblage of its limbs. O borders of the slope all about me! It is
through you that we receive the waters of the sky, and you are the
recipients of the Offering!
This damp morning, at the turn of the road between the tomb and the
tree, I saw the somber and enormous hill barred at the foot by the
flashing line of a river, which stood out like a stream of milk in the
light of noon.
Like a body sinking through water of its own weight, during these four
motionless hours I have been advancing to the heart of the light,
feeling a divine resistance. I am holding myself erect in perfectly
white air. While I cast no shadow, I am celebrating the orgy of the
maturity of day.
No longer, under the sudden brilliance of a greedy sun, does the earth
burst into violent flowering. Lustral moment! A continual breath blows
to us from between the Orient and the North. The opulent harvest, the
trees weighed down with their burdens, stir ceaselessly under the soft
irresistible wind. The fruits of the great earth are stirred in the
purifying splendor. The sky is no longer high above us; brought low,
it submerges and damps us. I, a new Hylas (like one who watches fishes
below him suspended in watery spaces) see through this milkiness, this
silver wherein I am drowned, a dazzling white bird with a pink throat
flash into sight and lose itself in a brilliance that my eye cannot
sustain.
The whole day does not exhaust my salutation. At the somber hour,--when
the wedding procession, armed with flaming torches, conducts the bridal
carriage through the forest of orange trees, with all my being I lift
applause and acclamation toward the red Sign I see upraised above the
wild circle of flaming mountains.
I salute the threshold, the material evidence of Hope, the recompense
of man uncompromised; I lift my hands toward this exposition of the
color of life! Autumnal triumph, the foliage above my head is thick
with little oranges! But once again my gaze, which has been uplifted
toward Death from infancy, must return to mankind; like the singer who,
with parted lips, waits to carry on his part--his heart lost in the
beat of the music, his eye on his score.
THE HANGING HOUSE
By a subterranean stairway I descend to the hanging house. Just as
the swallow fashions her shelter with patience, between the planks
and the rafter, and the seagull glues her nest like a pannier to the
rock; so, by a system of clamps, bolts, and girders driven into the
stone, the wooden box that I inhabit is solidly attached to the arch
of an enormous porch hollowed in the mountain itself. A trap-door
arranged in the floor connects me with the world; by means of it on
both these days, letting my little basket drop at the end of a cord,
I have drawn it up filled with a little rice, some roasted pistachio
nuts, and vegetables pickled in brine. In a corner of the formidable
masonry, like a trophy made of Medusa’s tresses, hangs a fountain whose
inexhaustible lament is carried away in a whirlpool. I draw up the
water I need by means of a cord knotted in open meshes, and the smoke
of my cooking mingles with the spray of the cascade.
The torrent is lost among the Palms, and I see below me the crowns of
the great trees from which they draw sacerdotal perfumes. And, as a
shattering of crystal is enough to disturb the night, all the keyboard
of the earth is awakened by this neutral, hollow jingling of rain on
that deep flint.
I see in the monstrous niche where I am ensconced the very tympanum
of the massive mountain, like an ear hollowed in the temporal rock.
And, collecting all my attention, bending all my joints, I will
attempt to hear, above the murmur of leaves and birds, those sounds
which this enormous and secret pavilion undoubtedly gives access to:
the oscillations of the universal waters, the shifting of geological
strata, the groans of the hurtling earth under an effort contrary to
gravitation.
Once a year the moon rises at my left above this escarpment, cutting
the shadows at the height of my waist on so exact a level that, with
ever so little more delicacy and precaution, I could float a plate of
copper upon it. But I like best the last step of the stairway, which
descends into the void. Many times I have awakened from meditation,
bathed in the dews of the night like a rose-bush; or, in the
comfortable afternoon, I have appeared to throw handfuls of dry letches
like little red bells to the monkeys perched below me on the furthest
branches.
THE SPRING
The crow, adjusting one eye on me as the clock-maker does on his watch,
would see me, a precise, miniature person--a cane like a dart between
my fingers--advancing by the straight footpath, moving briskly along.
The country, between the mountains that enclose it, is as flat as the
bottom of a frying-pan. To right and left the work of harvesting goes
on; they shear the earth as if it were a sheep. I dispute the width of
the path, and my place on it, with an uninterrupted file of workers;
those who are going to the fields, spade at belt; those who are
returning, bending like scales under the weight of double baskets whose
form is at once round and square, joining the symbols of the earth and
the sky.
I walk a long time; the open air is as close as a room, the sky is
somber, and the long columns of stagnant smoke are stationary like the
remains of some barbaric pyre. I leave the shorn rice-fields and the
harvest-fields of slime; and, little by little, I mount the narrowing
gorge. Useless reeds succeed the fields of sugar-cane; and three
times, with shoes in hands, I cross the rapid waters gathered into
the current of a river. I have undertaken to find the source of one
of these streams that feed the river, here, where it arises in the
heart of a five-gorged valley. The ascent becomes more difficult as
the thread of the cascade extends. I leave beneath me the last field
of potatoes, and, all at once, I have entered into a wood like that
which on Parnassus served for the assembly of the Muses! All about
me the tea-plants lift their distorted shoots and their dry, somber
foliage,--so high that my stretched hand cannot reach it. Charming
retreat! Quaint and mysterious shadow, enameled with a perpetual
flowering! A delicate perfume, which seems to survive rather than
emanate, flatters the nostril while recreating the spirit. And in
a hollow I discover the spring! Like grain out of a furious hopper
the water from beneath the earth bursts forth, leaping and bubbling.
Impurities are absorbed. Only that which is pure, untainted at the
source, leaps out. Born of the roseate sky (gathered in what profound
matrix!) the virgin water, with living force, pours from the opening
like a cry. Happy those from whom a new word bursts with violence! May
my mouth be supplied forever like this spring,--which, sustained by a
perpetual, solitary renewal, cares not that it must serve for the works
of Man,--for those lowlands where, spreading wide and inundating the
tilth, it will nourish the vast, stagnant harvest-fields.
THE TIDE AT NOON
When the time comes that he can sail no longer, the mariner makes his
home near the sea; and when it moans he rises to watch, unable to sleep
longer; like a nurse who hears a little child complain in the night.
I do likewise, and, by the living virtue of the sea in my blood, my
mind communicates with the movement of the waters as does a city by its
secret drains.
While I am speaking or writing, resting or eating, I participate in
the sea, which rises toward or recedes from me. And often at noon,
temporary citizen of this commercial coast, I gaze on what the tide
brings us: the tribute of the ocean gathered into this flowing channel
in one wide current of yellow water.
I observe the approach of all the people of the sea, the procession of
ships towed by the tide as if on the chain of a barge, the junks with
their four bulging sails as smooth and stiff as blades, in a puff of
wind. Those from Foutchéou carry an enormous fagot of beams lashed to
each side; then, among a scattering of tri-colored sampans, come the
giants of Europe, the American sailing ships full of gasoline; all the
“camels” of Madian, all the cargoes of Hamburg and London, all the
carriers of the Coast and the Islands.
The air is very clear. I enter into a light so pure that neither my
secret conscience, it seems, nor my body, offer resistance to it. It
is deliciously cool. With closed mouth, I breathe the sunlight, my
nostrils open to the exhilarating air. Meanwhile noon sounds from the
tower of the Customs; the ball of the semaphore drops, all the boats
mark off the hour, cannon thunder, the Angelus rings its part, the
whistles of the factories mingle with the long tumult of the siren.
All humanity gathers together to eat; the sampan man at the stern of
his skiff, lifting a wooden cover, surveys with a contented eye the
simmering of his stew. The wharf-hands, tied up in thick bundles of
rags, each yoke carried over the shoulder like a pike, surround the
open-air kitchen; those who are already served, all laughing, seated on
the edges of the wheelbarrows, with bowls of smoking rice between their
hands, test the heat with the ends of their greedy tongues.
The regulator of Life’s level rises; all the sluices of the earth are
filled; the rivers suspend their course; and the sea, mingling her salt
with their sands, joins them, to drink fully at their mouths. It is the
hour of plenitude. Now the tortuous canals which cross the city become
long serpents of close-packed barges advancing amid vociferations; and
the irresistible waters, in their expansion, float bridges of boats and
dead bodies from the mud, like corks.
THE PERIL OF THE SEA
As I cannot eat, I remount to the poop, a piece of bread in my pocket;
and, staggering, deafened, blown about, I join in the wild darkness and
the indescribable confusion of noise. In this void, opening my lips, I
carry a mouthful blindly to them. Soon, leaving the binnacle, little
by little I can make out the form of the ship, and beyond, just at the
limit of the contracted horizon, the sea in the clutches of the wind.
In that black circle, I see the pale charging cavalry of the foam.
Nowhere about me is there solidity. I stand amid chaos. I am lost in
the inner caverns of Death. My heart is grasped by the bitterness of
the last hour. This is no menace brandished at me; it is simply that
I have intruded into the uninhabitable. I am of no importance. I am
voyaging through an indifferent element. I am at the mercy of the moods
of the deep, of the mind, of the powers of the abyss. In the cataclysm
that surrounds me, no compact holds; and the handful of human souls
which this narrow vessel contains, may be scattered over the waters
like a basket of bran. A delicate balance sustains me on the bosom of
this abyss which is ready to join with my own weight and engulf me.
To escape this disheartening sight, I go to my cabin and to bed. Head
to the wind, the boat lifts to the surge; and every once in a while
the enormous hull, with its iron plate and boilers, its armament and
storerooms filled with coal and projectiles, settles back upon the
waves like a rider who gathers himself, gripping tightly with his
knees, before a leap.
Then a little calm comes, and below me I hear the screw continue its
feeble and homely sound.
But before the day which follows is ended, our ship enters the lonely
port enclosed like a reservoir by a mountain range. Here is Life again!
Touched with an artless joy, I may resume my survey of the brisk and
lively spectacle, of the spontaneous play of common interests, of this
assiduous, multifold, intermingled activity by which all things exist
together.
Just as we drop anchor, the sun, through a gap in the mountains which
hide it, shoots toward the earth four jets of fire so intense that they
seem emissions of its very substance. Before raising them vertically
to the illimitable sky, this king, appearing upon the highest ridge
(Eye of our eyes, in the merciful possession of the Vision made
visible!) makes, at this supreme hour, a majestic exposition of
distance and origin. For a welcome I have this farewell, richer than a
promise! The mountain is vestured in rose and violet, the marriage of
light and night. I am overcome with a deep, strong sweetness. I lift to
God my gratitude still to be alive, and my whole being expands in the
realization of my reprieve.
This time I shall not drink the bitter waters!
ON LIGHT
I do not think--I entirely reject the idea that colors constitute
the first element, and that the sun is only the synthesis of their
spectrum. I cannot see that the sun may be white, and that each color
gives a share of its own virtue to it, and that their accord determines
it. There is no color without an extrinsic support; from which we learn
that it is itself an exterior thing, the diverse witness that matter
renders to the pure source of indivisible splendor. Do not pretend to
separate light; since it is light which divides darkness, producing
seven notes according to the intensity of its effort. A vase of water
or a prism, by the interposition of a transparent and thick medium and
the refractive play of facets, allows us to watch this in the act. The
free direct ray remains invariable, but color appears as soon as there
is a captured refraction, which matter takes to itself as an especial
attribute. The prism, in the calculated dispersive powers of its
three angles and the concerted action of its dihedral triple mirror,
encloses all possible play of reflections, and restores to the light
its _equivalent in color_. I compare light to a woven substance,--where
the rays constitute the warp, and where the wave of color, always
implying a repercussion, is the woof. Color is nothing more than that.
If I examine the rainbow or the spectrum projected on a wall, I see
a gradation in the nature of the tints, as well as in their relative
intensity. Yellow occupies the center of the spectrum and permeates
it to each edge, where the outer tones exclude it by degrees of
obscuration. We can understand it to be the most immediate veil of
light, while red and blue are reciprocal images of light metamorphized
into two equally balanced tones. Light plays the rôle of mediator; it
prepares the mixed colors by blending them in neighboring bands, thus
provoking complementary tones. In it and by it, extreme red combined
with green--as blue combines with orange--disappears in the unity of
white.
Color, then, is a particular phenomenon of reflection, which the
reflecting body, penetrated by the light, appropriates and restores
in an altered form. This form is the result of the ray’s complete and
ruthless analysis and examination which will not be denied.
And the intensity of tones varies, following a gamut of which yellow is
the keynote, according to the more or less complete response of matter
to the solicitations of the light.
Who would not be shocked with the affirmation of the classic theory
that the color of an object results from its absorption of all the
colored rays except that one whose livery it seems to wear? On the
contrary, I should think that color, which constitutes the visible
individuality of each thing, is an original and authentic quality in
it; and that the color of the rose is no less its property than the
perfume.
That which we measure is not the rapidity of light, but simply the
resistance that its surroundings oppose to it, while transforming it.
And visibility itself is only one of the properties of light; differing
with different subjects.
HOURS IN THE GARDEN