One might well doubt this. The whole of humanity at this moment utters
one despairing, heart-rending cry. It bellows like a wounded beast of
burden, it simply does not understand its wound.
All convictions and all certitudes are at one another’s throats. How
can we recognize them, with that lost look they have, that blood that
soils and disfigures them? In the hurricane, opinions, uprooted, have
lost their soil and their sap. They drift like autumn thistles, dry
thistles that yet have power to tear the skin. Men no longer know
anything but their insurmountable suffering, a suffering that has no
limit and seems to be without reason. They groan and desire nothing but
to be alleviated. Will a century of pious tenderness suffice to bathe,
drain, close the vast wound?
Without delay, O streaming wound, your living flesh must be stanched
and bathed. From now on, no matter how long you bleed, you must be
anointed and protected, and if you are opened up again ten times, ten
times must you be anointed anew and covered once more.
Yet, do not doubt it, humanity even in this terrible hour seeks for
nothing but its own happiness. It rushes forward, by instinct, like a
herd that smells the salt-lick and the spring. But it will suffocate
rather than not enjoy everything together and at once.
Happiness?
God! who has given it this painful and ridiculous idea? What were
they about, the priests, the scientists, and the people who write
the books? What has been taught the children of men that they could
have been made to believe that war brings happiness to anyone? Let
them declare themselves, those who have assured the poor in spirit
that their happiness depends upon the possession of a province, an
iron-mine, or a foaming arm of the sea between two distant continents!
It is thus that they have all set out for the conquest of happiness,
since that is destiny, and there has been placed in their hands
precisely what was certain to destroy happiness forever.
And yet, if you will bear with me, we need not lose all hope. So long
as there is a single wall-flower to tremble in the coming Aprils over
the ruins of the world, let us repeat from the depths of our hearts:
“Happiness, you are truly my end and the reason for my being, I know it
through my own tears.”