There is another refuge!
“What makes hope so intense a pleasure,” writes M. Bergson, “is that
the future, which we fashion to suit ourselves, appears to us at one
and the same time under a multitude of forms, all equally smiling,
equally possible. Even if the most desirable of them all is realized,
we must have sacrificed the others, and we shall have lost much. The
idea of the future, pregnant with infinite possibilities, is therefore
more fertile than the future itself, and that is why we find more
charm in hope than in possession, in reverie than in reality.”
The idea of the future alone interests us: that alone is our treasure,
that alone is endowed with existence. It is that indeed which we call
the future. And if M. Bergson, at the end of these admirable lines,
creates a distinction between the future and the idea of the future, he
does not make us forget that he has just, and as if by design, caused
the confusion; for what “we fashion to suit ourselves” is the idea of
the future, and nothing else. But, following the example of M. Bergson,
let us call our idea of the future the future itself.
This idea is our cherished fortune. Certainly we take a passionate
interest in seeking, in what flows out of the present, something that
resembles the realization of our dreams. And yet their realization,
like their failure, marks, in every sense, their end, their exhaustion.
And that is insupportable to us. Whatever fate the present reserves for
our imaginings, we labor every day, as fast as time devours them and
destroys them by making them finite, to push them further back into the
infinite, to prolong them, to reconstruct them, so that we may never
have less of a future at our disposal.
This need of a future, which has no other connection than our hope with
the rugged actuality of the present, is so deep-rooted, so generally
human a thing, that one cannot contemplate it without a respect which
is almost religious. In order that this future, so pregnant with
dreams, should be as necessary as it is to the moral life of most
men, it must represent a truly incomparable treasure. The embrace we
throw around it is the close and powerful embrace we reserve for those
possessions that lie nearest our hearts. And, since we have already
detached the word “possession” from the gross meaning that is usually
attributed to it, let us say that the possession of a dream, when it
assures our happiness, is a reality less debatable and less illusory
than the possession of a coal-mine or a field of wheat.
But as there is no possession without conquest, without effort, we must
merit our dreams and cultivate them lovingly.
If people who have taken the mould of reason reproach us with
distracting for a moment the men of that practical reality which
pretends to be preparing the future, we are ready to reply to them:
“Glance at those men to whom our words are addressed. You know that
they are crushed with fatigue and privation. They have experienced
every danger and every sort of weariness. By what right will you hinder
them from taking refuge in a world which is henceforth the least
contestable of their domains? Do not, on their account, be afraid of
reverie; it could never fill them with as much bitterness as does this
modern reality of which you are the unpunished builders.
“If you are not weary of glimpsing your future through the
specifications, the account-books, the cage-bars, and the unbreathable
fumes of industrialism, at least allow these to cherish a marvelous
and, in spite of all its disappointments, an efficacious future. It
is not a question of forgetting life,--that is too beautiful and too
desirable, but rather of amplifying and fertilizing it. Whatever may
be the outcome of a generous dream, it always ennobles the man who has
entertained it. Allow the unhappy to be rich in a possession that costs
them only love and simple faith. Do not let your reason dispossess them
of the only treasure that your greed has not been able to snatch from
them. It is the cult of the future and of memory that sustains man in
the uncertainty of the present hour. If he walks by instinct towards
these refuges, do not turn him aside, and think, O priests of reason,
of the warning of Pascal: ‘It is on the knowledge of the heart and of
the instincts that Reason has to lean, and establish there the whole of
her discourse’.”
X
I have seen thousands of men suffer and die. Every day I see new ones
enter the somber arena and struggle. My part is to help them in this
torment, to assure them aid and hope. I have a wide experience of these
things now and I know that men are never denied a future, even when
life is on the point of betraying them.
Philosophers and poets, led astray by religion or by a mystical passion
for death, have given the severe counsel that we should never conceal
from the dying the approach of their annihilation. It is a theoretical
view of charity, an artificial, mischievous doctrine that does not
stand the test, that should not be put to the test. Its partisans
suspect falsehood where there is only pity and modesty, for it is not
the part of man to be so proud of his own judgment as to take away from
someone with the certitude of life that fabulous future which is more
precious than life itself.
I remember, in 1915, a wounded man, who had just received the visit
of a priest moved by praiseworthy intentions and a clumsy exaltation,
saying to me suddenly, “I know now that I am going to die!” and
beginning to weep terribly. I went to see the priest and reproached him
for his behavior. “What!” that eloquent man replied haughtily, “do you
who are incapable of preserving this unhappy man’s earthly life blame
me for assuring him his future life?” Alas! Alas! I still think of the
sobs of that wounded man; they were those of one who has just lost his
supreme wealth and to whom nothing else can make amends.
Soldiers who, in the full vigor of their youth, suffer a severe,
a final mutilation experience at first that is like a veritable
amputation of their future, so true is it that every part of our
physical self is intimately bound up with the labors of our dream.
Then, with surprising rapidity, and long before the disorder of the
tissues has been exorcised, one sees them filling in the moral breach,
raising up the crumbled wall, propping it hastily and reconstructing,
quite as new but quite complete and tightly shut, the sacred fortress
outside which their soul remains vulnerable and disarmed.
In truth, the man who is condemned to death is still rich in the
future, even when his body sinks, ten times pierced by bullets, even
when he has only one drop of blood left, one flickering spark of life.