If you are unhappy, oppressed, if you have melancholy doubts of your
future, of your ability, of your power to love, and if nothing in
heaven replies to your prayer, to your need for deliverance, remember
that you are not abandoned without resource. Men remain to you. The
best among them have made for your consolation, for your redemption,
statues, books and songs.
Open one of these books, therefore, and plunge into it! Sink into it as
into a cool forest, as into a deep, running brook.
A man is speaking to you of himself or of the world. Read! Read on!
Little by little the harmonious voice envelopes you, cradles you, lifts
you up and suddenly bears you away. The tightness in your throat seems
to relax, you breathe with a sort of fervor and exaltation. Generous
tears start to your eyes or your whole soul shakes with laughter.
This great and wholesome exaltation people attribute to the miraculous
presence of beauty. No doubt, no doubt! But that vague and simple
explanation is an almost mythical one.
For you must realize that the man with whom you have just been having
a sort of intimate colloquy has comforted you and carried you out of
yourself mainly because he has been able to prove to you that you were
neither abandoned, nor destitute, nor truly disgraced. He has seemed
to you great but, in recalling to you that you are of the same race as
himself, he has effaced himself before you. He has given you happy,
courageous, new thoughts, and you have suddenly seen that you were
thinking them also. For a second you have both communed together. And
you have felt yourself once more in possession of a treasure that was
escaping you.
It is true, all these thoughts are your own, since it is enough for
you to see them in writing to recognize them. It is true, you too have
your grandeur, your nobility and infinite resources. How could you have
forgotten it for a moment? It is enough for you to open that book or to
hum that song to remember it. It is true, your life also is astonishing
and full of adventures. How did you fall into that despair? What did
that discouragement signify?