VIITHE SHELTER OF LIFE
Two immense worlds remain faithful to me when the others discourage or betray me. Two refuges open to my heart when it is weary, faltering or harassed with temptation.
I should like very much to tell you about them, since you are my friend. I can tell you, since you have nothing to envy me, since you bear within yourself two such worlds, two kingdoms that will submit to you undividedly, without contest.
Yesterday I was watching some prisoners working. They were pushing the trunk of a tree lashed to a cart. Sweat was rolling down their faces, for the heat was great, the slope steep and the load heavy. An armed soldier was watching them. Large letters were printed on their clothes to proclaim their servitude. And I thought: they live, they do not look too unhappy, they do not seem crushed by their condition. And if this is so, it is not because they have the placidity of beasts. No! Look at their eyes,listen to their voices. It is precisely because they are men and they carry everywhere with them two refuges, whither the gaoler cannot follow them, two precious possessions that no punitive discipline can snatch from them: their future and their memories.
The longer I watch, from close by, those men who, for four years have led the inhuman life of the army, the better I understand the meaning of their incredible patience: between the future and the remembered past they have the air of awaiting the passage of a storm. They are gulping down, you would say, hastily and with closed eyes, this bitter and criminal present, in order to reserve their hearts all the better for the things of the future and the past. One feels in their conversation only these two luminous existences. They seek and unite them unceasingly above the bloody abyss. I have also observed that, in the concerts they give themselves to cheer their periods of rest, their souls always return, with the same rapture, to their former way of living, to their old sons, their familiar ways of being sad or joyous. The artistic attempts that are carried on to interest them, at the bottom of their hearts, in the formidable present, remain sterile and, as it were, dry.
They seem to reply, silently: “What have all these things to do with us? Isn’t it enough for us to live them? Isn’t it enough for us to do them,every day with our blood and tears? Give us back our dear kingdom. Give back to our souls that memory which is their most imperishable and marvelous possession.”
Between the future and the remembered past, man is left to struggle with what he possesses least, the present.
And yet this present is lavish of all sorts of materials that we can transform into riches. It is our liquid fortune, mobile and in circulation. It is the well-filled purse upon which we draw for our daily needs.
It reaches us out of the depths of time, like a great river, loaded with sailing-ships and steamers, deep, flowing, beautiful with all its reflections, and rolling gold in its sands.
But it has its rages, its whims, its cruelties. According to the season, it overflows and desolates the land or suddenly dries up and deserts the fields that it refreshed with its floods!
So be it! If the present refuses to yield its manna, we will draw upon our last resources. If the times overwhelm us with bitterness, we will flee to our refuges, where we have nothing to fear from intruders or masters or tormentors.
Common-sense folk, who have the secret of debasinglife in the name of a reason that is more mischievous than actual stupidity, are in the habit of devoting an almost superstitious worship to the present reality. To tell the truth, they are greatly afraid that the taste for memory and hope will turn young men away from that immediate action which is necessary for the conquest and preservation of material wealth.
They honor with great pomp the origins in the past of those traditions that are favorable to them; and the way they invoke and prepare for the future loads the present with chains and shackles.
They dread, in reverie, an enemy of action. As if there were any great actions that have not their source in great dreams!
These people deceive themselves. They sacrifice an unequalled consolation to the needs of a fleeting fortune. But do not imagine that the failure of their fortune leaves these men utterly abandoned: the refuges open gladly, even for those who have despised them.
An intimate friend once said to me, as he watched his little son playing: “You see; he’s no longer the baby you knew last year. He’s another child. I have been cheated of the one I had last year. I shall never have him again. I have lost a child.”
O dear, big heart, how beautiful and how unjust those words are! How human! How they overflow with ingratitude and with adoration!
You know quite well that every object that appears on the horizon of our souls has, for us, two existences. One is sudden, sharp, almost always penetrated with an intense and, so to say, corrosive flavor: that is the existence of the present. Men agree in recognizing that its duration is hardly measurable. But the other existence is perennial, as ample as the measure of our life and our thoughts; in this sense it is almost infinite.
Thus each moment of the present survives in memory for years, and doubtless for centuries, since posterity can gather up and prolong the best of our acts and our works.
It is true, my friend, that each moment dispossesses us, even of the object we never withdraw our arms from. The miser, infatuated with his material riches, may well suffer agony of mind over them, but we, we? Do we not know that each moment restores to us, transfigured, all the treasures it has snatched away from us? It robs us of the frailer blessings, it offers us imperishable blessings, less mortal than ourselves.
You have conquered one whole happy day. Contemplate without regret the sleep that marks its end, for you will continue to live this day duringall the rest of jour life. And if this day was truly beautiful, do you not know that others after you will continue to live it, down, ever farther down, the succession of the years?
Let your son grow, without too much anxiety, like a beautiful tree: the child he was once, the child he was but now, the child he is at present, you will not lose them, O insatiable heart! They will escort you toward old age, like a beloved multitude that increases every day and cannot die.
Owing to the war, I have seen my own child only seven times, and each time I have hardly recognized him. Seven times I have believed him lost. I know now that I have seven lovely images in my soul, seven children to adorn and hearten my solitude.
There are beauties which the present fails to appreciate. That is natural, because it is greedy, disordered, care-ridden. Memory exists to see that justice is done. To it falls the divine rôle of restoring and, at times, pardoning. (It is memory which, in the last resort, vindicates and judges. It is in its light that things appear to us under the aspect of eternity.)
None of our thoughts would be really happy that had not received the approbation of memory, that did not find themselves sealed at last with its sovereignimprint. We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on color; and only then, after that recoil and that transfiguration, do we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil splendor.
Days of ours that had seemed to us dull and hopeless show themselves in memory luminous and decisive. Journeys undertaken without eagerness, without enthusiasm, and without any of the freshness of surprise, become, from a distance, fruitful in revelations and discoveries.
Every reality develops with time a thousand aspects of itself that are just as real, as charged with meaning and consequence, as the original aspect. We cannot foretell what memory will contrive for us. It is a treasure all the more precious and unexpected because it is so independent of our rudimentary logic. For the logic of memory is more subtle than ours; it seems entirely free from our miserable calculations; it draws its inspirations from our true interests, which we ourselves are forever misapprehending. The slow task it pursues testifies to so rare a virtue and so munificent a wisdom that man, struck with his own unworthiness, might well seek there the signs of a divine intervention.
Sometimes it is a friend, whom we have misunderstoodor misjudged, who takes on in memory his true aspect and his true stature and reveals the profound influence which, without our knowing it, he has exercised over our thoughts.
Sometimes it is a word which we heard at first with an inattentive or distrustful ear, and which we find again engraved in letters of gold over the portico of the secret temple where we love to collect our thoughts.
Like some skilful goldsmith, memory seizes the materials that our life accumulates haphazard. It submits them to the touchstone, fashions them, embellishes them and imprints upon them that mysterious sheen which gives them their distinctive meaning and their value.
The cult of memory should not turn us away from the present out of which memory itself draws its nourishment.
We sometimes meet men of whom plain people say, with profound wisdom, “Their mind is elsewhere.” It is true; they are the timid and tormented souls who have early sought in memory a refuge which nothing, it seems, could ever make them renounce.
Let us beware of troubling this retreat. Some day, perhaps, we may long for one like it. But however deeply one may seem to have taken refuge inmemory, one cannot escape the clutch, the invasion of the present.
It is best, therefore, and with all the strength that is in us, to accept, honor, love this present as the principal source of our riches.
If the true cult of memory were a less exceptional moral usage, many men would hesitate to create bad memories for themselves; for our worst memories are not those of our sufferings, our ordeals, our privations, but of our shameful acts, our cowardices and our betrayals.
Our weakness lasted only a moment; must we really, for thirty years, feel the hostile stare of that moment resting heavily upon us? Who knows? Hope, even so, in the clemency of memory, which is able to mitigate and pardon everything. It is indulgent and full of pity. In a world given over to spite and reprisals, it remains the only inviolable refuge of the outcast, as the cathedrals used to be in the days of the right of sanctuary.
For him who descends with true fervor into his own depths, memory always preserves some corner pure from all baseness. Do we not know, moreover, that in order to console us memory consents to work in concert even with its enemy, forgetfulness?
Who can dispute with us the world of memory? No one! And who would dare, without fear, to do so? It is because we are more ardently attached to this possession than to any other.
At times, a clumsy or malevolent hand succeeds in smirching one of our dear memories. Then we experience an indignation and a despair as lasting and profound as if these sentiments recognized their cause in the loss or the fall of a loved being.
Happily this criminal work implies a rarely evil spirit, a sort of perverse genius of which humanity is none too prodigal. And then our memory is a territory too vast, too mountainous, too impregnable as a whole for the rage of hostile destruction to be able to defile or mar large portions of it. The best of our memories thus remain in safety and for us alone. Besides, we keep careful watch around this fortune.
Our great memories are actual moral personages, so necessary to our happiness that we bear them under a sacred arch, sheltered from all injury, from all contact. It is into this solitude that we go ceaselessly to question them, invoke them, call them to witness.
A past in common does not always give memories in common, so true it is that the heart defends itself,in its innermost retreat, as the physical self defends its flesh against the intrusions of the stranger.
It sometimes happens that men find pleasure in recalling in our presence the episodes of an existence that was passed, by themselves or by them and us, in companionship. It is then that we measure the road our soul has travelled on its solitary path: these things of which they speak to us, these deeds which, it seems, we have performed, these landscapes which they remember having crossed in our company, we no longer recognize; we do not even wish to recognize them. We smile in an embarrassed, awkward, unhappy way. Our whole attitude says: “Is it really true that we have drunk from the same cup? For all that, it was not the same wine we drank, and my intoxication is not yours.”
We cannot give to one who is dear to us a greater proof of love than to admit him to the intimacy of our memories. We have need of all our tenderness to help us to introduce another soul into the subterranean basilica, to lead that soul as close as possible to the refuge where, in spite of all, there is only room for one.
Perfect communion in memory is an extraordinary favor, and an admonition. If it is given to you to enjoy it, open your arms and receive one elect soul.
No doubt you have had the experience, when passing through a country where you were travelling for the first time, of stopping short, as you rounded a mountain, before some unknown horizon, and finding it strangely familiar.
No doubt you have had the experience of arriving at night in a dark square where you knew you had never been before, and briskly finding your way through it, just as if you were resuming some old habit.
At times the spectacle of a smiling valley arrests you at the top of some hill. You thought you knew nothing of this country, and yet strange and sure impressions guide you; they are like old memories. You advance, and behold, you are looking at everything as if you recognized it. That road which winds between the pastures, as supple and sinuous as a beautiful river of yellow water,—you are almost certain you have followed it long ago, in some misty, far-off existence which, nevertheless, is not your own.
There are times, too, when you are dreaming, as you sit alone, and suddenly a memory passes over you: the memory of some act the man you are surely never performed. Yet it is not a fabrication, an invention. You know, you feel, that it is a personal memory. A memory of what world? Of what life?
Do not reject this shadowy treasure, and do not tremble! Do not accept complacently the explanations of the superstitious or of the pseudo-scientists. The flesh of your flesh was not born yesterday. Something survives in it that is contemporaneous with all the generations. Many a revelation awaits us. Let us keep for them a soul that is accessible, experienced, and not too distrustful.
VIII
Do not imagine that to possess memory is to possess a dead world.
Among your friends there is surely one who has a house and a garden. From time to time he invites you to visit him. Every time you enter his house you observe some striking change: he has connected two parts of the building which till then had no means of communication. He has planted some new trees. The old elms are flourishing. Some rosebushes have died. Urns have been set out on the lawn. The life of men, of animals, of plants has drawn the inanimate world into its toils, modeled it, sculptured it, forced it to take part in the movement of the soul.
It is in like fashion that the domains of memory cultivate themselves and live. They are not ruins, inalterable, rigid, fixed forever in the ice of some past epoch. Life still penetrates and moves them;they do not cease to share in its enterprises, its labors, its festivals.
When a man has opened for you several times the same gate in the wall, when several times he has related the same adventure to you, with intervals of a few months or a few years, observe closely the spots to which he leads you and the persons to whom he presents you. Every time you will find new things, you will find that roads have been laid out, underbrush cut down, windows opened and unexpected supernumeraries called in.
Is it true then that that was a dead tale, wrapped up in what we call the shroud of the past?
The world of “living memory” is so indissolubly bound up with our resolutions and our acts that in accumulating memories we feel we are preparing, erecting our future itself.
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 morefertile 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 thepresent, 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 oftheir 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’.”
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, “doyou 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.
O present hour, magnificent, foaming fountain, you know very well that we shall be faithful to you! With your thousand animated faces, your landscapes, your problems, your combats and thatheavy burden of jostling ideas you carry with you, you will always attract us, you will see us all together drinking of your waters.
But when you no longer contain for us anything but anger and hatred, greed and cruelty, then indeed we must each of us abandon you and turn to our refuges; we must each of us withdraw into the Thebaid where all things still respond to our voice, to our voice alone.
May our fate preserve us from the greatest of all misfortunes! May our refuges never lose in our eyes their virtue and their security! This supreme affliction at times befalls us, and it is then that our souls, exiled from their homeland, must set themselves humbly to the search for the lost grace.