Welcome your own true thought, whatever may be the hour at which it
visits you. If it chooses to rouse you in the middle of the night, rise
to do it honor and look at it with clear eyes.
There are some who have just missed an hour of greatness because they
preferred to slumber under the warm eiderdown. The spirit called them
in a low voice, in the darkness of the cold room; they did not rise
and they will never know what they might have become. They will try
to console themselves by thinking they have dreamed; will they ever
console themselves?
There are some who, suddenly, through the mist of tobacco smoke, have
seen their souls, like some long-awaited supernatural being, watching
them.
At the moment they were playing cards or reading their paper; they
thought: “Wait, I’ll join you in a moment.” The game ended, or the
paper thrown aside, the visitor had departed.
They rushed forth in pursuit, their hearts convulsed with shame and
anguish. Alas! the deep melancholy glance will perhaps never shine
upon them again. Perhaps they will never again come face to face with
themselves.
In the midst of pleasure, when you are enjoying the company of a woman
or the conversation of bold, intelligent men, if you chance to hear the
voice of solitude singing like a siren at your feet, leave everything
to flee with her.
V
When Epictetus said: “Our good and evil exist only in our own will,”
he misstated the problem. That is one way of solving it, but more
often it is a way of assuming that it has been solved, an expedient for
passing it over.
I am not happy today; I am not pleased with myself, I am not pleased
with anyone; I feel quite certain that everything I undertake will be a
failure, above all, above all, I do not want to undertake anything; I
view all things with an unprofitable eye, an irritable and apparently
dried-up soul. I am driven to suffer myself and make others suffer.
Oh! I am without grace! I know it and I am far from admiring myself.
Secretly I long to feel grace at last descending on my head and
shoulders like a mantle of soft sunshine, like the honeyed perfume that
falls from the lime-trees.
What does that old man want? Why does he repeat with a sort of
obstinacy: “It depends upon you to make a good use of every event”?
No doubt it depends upon me!
But what are we to do when nothing can be blamed upon events? And what
when, indeed, there are no events.
Is it true that it depends upon me to be myself at such times also?
Answer me, great, silent trees! Answer me, fir-tree, weighted down
with sleet and dreaming--Heine has told me--of the palm consumed with
burning heat in the tropics.
“Drive out,” replies the philosopher, “drive out your desires and your
fears and you will never again suffer tyranny.”
True; but I have only one fear: not to be the best man I may; only one
desire, not to give in to myself.
The sage shrugs his shoulders and then says in a gentle voice: “Bear
and forbear.” And he is not thinking only of the storms that come from
without.
He says this because he well knows that in order to be happy one must
be visited by grace.
All the stoics have drawn up rules of virtue. Not one has suggested the
means that will give us the strength to apply them. For the wish is
not enough. The gift is necessary, that secret impulse which is grace
itself.