I was alone. It was late at night, and I was sitting at my table. My
lamp was buzzing like summer in the fields. I lifted my eyes. The
stars studded the heavens above. The city was plunged at my feet. The
horizon escaped from nearby into eternity. The lights and shadows
formed an infinite sphere around me.
I was not at ease that night. I was a prey to an immense distress. I
sat as if I had fallen into my chair. As on the first day I looked at
my reflection in the glass, and all I could do was just what I had done
then, simply cry, "I!"
I wanted to know the secret of life. I had seen men, groups, deeds,
faces. In the twilight I had seen the tremulous eyes of beings as deep
as wells. I had seen the mouth that said in a burst of glory, "I am
more sensitive than others." I had seen the struggle to love and make
one's self understood, the refusal of two persons in conversation to
give themselves to each other, the coming together of two lovers, the
lovers with an infectious smile, who are lovers in name only, who bury
themselves in kisses, who press wound to wound to cure themselves,
between whom there is really no attachment, and who, in spite of their
ecstasy deriving light from shadow, are strangers as much as the sun
and the moon are strangers. I had heard those who could find no crumb
of peace except in the confession of their shameful misery, and I had
seen faces pale and red-eyed from crying. I wanted to grasp it all at
the same time. All the truths taken together make only one truth. I
had had to wait until that day to learn this simple thing. It was this
truth of truths which I needed.
Not because of my love of mankind. It is not true that we love
mankind. No one ever has loved, does love, or will love mankind. It
was for myself, solely for myself, that I sought to attain the full
truth, which is above emotion, above peace, even above life, like a
sort of death. I wanted to derive guidance from it, a faith. I wanted
to use it for my own good.
I went over the things I had seen since living in the boarding-house.
They were so numerous that I had become a stranger to myself. I
scarcely had a name any more. I fairly listened to the memory of them,
and in supreme concentration I tried to see and understand what I was.
It would be so beautiful to know who I was.
I thought of all those wise men, poets, artists before me who had
suffered, wept, and smiled on the road to truth. I thought of the
Latin poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing them truth
as unveiled as a statue. A fragment of his prelude came to my mind,
learned long ago, then dismissed and lost like almost everything that I
had taken the pains to learn up till then. He said he kept watch in
the serene nights to find the words, the poem in which to convey to men
the ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand years men have
always had to be reassured and consoled. For two thousand years I have
had to be delivered. Nothing has changed the surface of things. The
teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of things, and would
not even if men had not ruined His teachings so that they can no longer
follow them honestly. Will the great poet come who shall settle the
boundaries of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will be, not a
fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise man, the great inexorable
poet? I do not know, although the lofty words of the man who died in
the boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming and the
right to adore him already.
But what about me--me, who am only a glance from the eye of destiny? I
am like a poet on the threshold of a work, an accursed, sterile poet
who will leave no glory behind, to whom chance /lent/ the truth that
genius would have /given/ him, a frail work which will pass away with
me, mortal and sealed to others like myself, but a sublime work
nevertheless, which will show the essential outlines of life and relate
the drama of dramas.
. . . . .
What am I? I am the desire not to die. I have always been impelled--
not that evening alone--by the need to construct the solid, powerful
dream that I shall never leave again. We are all, always, the desire
not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's
complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to /be,/ to
/be/ more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have,
all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in
one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new
sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to
add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon
the fear of death. That is what it is. I have seen it myself.
Instinctive movements, untrammelled utterances always tend the same
way, and the most dissimilar utterances are all alike.
. . . . .
But afterwards! Where are the words that will light the way? What is
humanity in the world, and what is the world?
Everything is within me, and there are no judges, and there are no
boundaries and no limits to me. The /de profundis,/ the effort not to
die, the fall of desire with its soaring cry, all this has not stopped.
It is part of the immense liberty which the incessant mechanism of the
human heart exercises (always something different, always!). And its
expansion is so great that death itself is effaced by it. For how
could I imagine my death, except by going outside of myself, and
looking at myself as if I were not I but somebody else?
We do not die. Each human being is alone in the world. It seems
absurd, contradictory to say this, and yet it is so. But there are
many human beings like me. No, we cannot say that. In saying that, we
set ourselves outside the truth in a kind of abstraction. All we can
say is: I am alone.
And that is why we do not die.
Once, bowed in the evening light, the dead man had said, "After my
death, life will continue. Every detail in the world will continue to
occupy the same place quietly. All the traces of my passing will die
little by little, and the void I leave behind will be filled once
more."
He was mistaken in saying so. He carried all the truth with him. Yet
we, /we/ saw him die. He was dead for us, but not for himself. I feel
there is a fearfully difficult truth here which we must get, a
formidable contradiction. But I hold on to the two ends of it, groping
to find out what formless language will translate it. Something like
this: "Every human being is the whole truth." I return to what I
heard. We do not die since we are alone. It is the others who die.
And this sentence, which comes to my lips tremulously, at once baleful
and beaming with light, announces that death is a false god.
But what of the others? Granted that I have the great wisdom to rid
myself of the haunting dread of my own death, there remains the death
of others and the death of so many feelings and so much sweetness. It
is not the conception of truth that will change sorrow. Sorrow, like
joy, is absolute.
And yet! The infinite grandeur of our misery becomes confused with
glory and almost with happiness, with cold haughty happiness. Was it
out of pride or joy that I began to smile when the first white streaks
of dawn turned my lamp pale and I saw I was alone in the universe?