I went, lately, to a laboratory, in the heart of a wilderness of glass
and porcelain, haunted with inhuman odors. A friend dwelt there. I saw
a great crystal cask full of distilled water; the sunlight quivered
through it freely and majestically. There, I thought, is the desert.
That water contained nothing, it was unfitted for life, it was as empty
as a dead world.
But then we scratched the bottom of the cask and looked at it with
the microscope. Little round, green algæ were growing in that desert.
A current of air had carried the germs, and they had increased and
multiplied. There where there was nothing to seize upon, they had yet
found something. The taste of barren glass, a few stray grains of dust,
that soulless water, that sunlight, they had asked for nothing more in
order to subsist and work out their humble joy.
I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to
happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest.
Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself.
If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel
of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean
mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy.
Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned.
I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. The antiseptics,
whose property it is to destroy living things, are at times invaded by
these obstinate fungi which encamp there, acclimatize themselves and
modestly fulfil their destiny.
One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence
than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of
men. So cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too,
that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it.
Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to
the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek
our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a
plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world.