VISORROW AND RENUNCIATION
If, concerning an old man, some one said to us: “He has been perfectly happy all his life, he is going to die without ever having suffered,” we should be incredulous at first; then, if we were obliged to admit the truth of the remark, we should feel for this old man not so much envy as pity. With our astonishment would be mingled, in spite of all, something a little like contempt.
Happiness is our aim, the final reason for our living. But is it fair to say that sorrow is opposed to happiness?
There are sorrows that one cannot, that one should not, escape. They are the very price we pay for happiness. It is by means of them that we travel toward our own development. They prepare us for joy and render us worthy of it. Without them, could we ever know that we were happy?
If I believed, O my unknown friend for whom todayI am hoping these consolations, if I believed that you could reach happiness, that is to say, the harmonious prosperity of your soul, without experiencing any agonies, I should not undertake to praise your suffering. But you suffer, I know it, and you are called to other sufferings. Henceforth I shall not refrain from praising what wounds you. For one does not console anyone by depreciating his grief, but by showing him how beautiful, how rare, how desirable it is, and your suffering can truly be called that.
I do not dream, then, of depriving you of your wealth. I only hope that you will be able to appreciate its full value. I beg that you will pardon me if I chance to hurt you by placing my hand upon your wound. I do it, you may be sure, with the affection and the solicitude of a man who has consecrated his life to such tasks.
They will tell you, my friend, that I am seeking to flatter your distress by reasonings that are full of guile, that I am singing to lull you to sleep and deceive you, that I am dressing in the gilded clothes of an age that is past the black demon that torments you. Let me still have your confidence: I have only one ambition,—it is your own greatest joy. I could not lead you astray without shame and without deceiving myself; for are you not indeed myself, O my friend?
There are some material fortunes which humble and reasonable men do not desire because they divine, in spite of the pleasures that result from them, what a crushing load they are.
By contrast, among the spiritual riches that we are able to possess, grief seems surrounded by a simple aureole. It is tyrannical, redoubtable, mutilating; its favorites are its victims. It does not descend upon its chosen ones with the softness of a dove, it pounces like a bird of prey, and those whom it carries off into the sky bear upon their sides the marks of its clenched claws.
But it is the sign of life; of all our possessions it is the last to leave us, it is the one that escorts us to the brink of the abyss.
It gives us the measure of man. He who has not suffered always seems to us a little like a child or a pauper.
The bitterness of men who have been often visited by sorrow is so truly a treasure that, if they could, they would not rid themselves of it for anything in the world: it resembles authority.
Through his tears, through his martyrdom, he who is charged with a great sorrow feels that he is the abode of some terrible thing that is also sacred and majestic. Great griefs command our respect. Beforethem knees tremble and heads bow as in the presence of thrones and tabernacles.
He who has suffered greatly makes us feel timid and humble before him. He knows things that we can only guess. We gaze upon him with passionate admiration as upon a traveller who has journeyed over oceans and explored far countries. It is at the time of his first wounds that the young man discovers his soul and plumbs his inner nobility.
Our grief is so precious a blessing that for its sake we dread inquisitive contacts. We preserve it jealously from the touch of those who might, through clumsiness or stupidity, debase this terrible and precious treasure. We long only that people should leave us alone with this bitter possession! Let them beware of frustrating us when they imagine that they are working for our relief!
When sorrow leaves us too soon, we feel a sort of shame and think less well of ourselves: it shone out of its shadowy casket, out of the deepest depths of the chest where we heap up our true treasures, and now, behold, it has vanished! We find ourselves almost miserable and utterly dispossessed.
The man who beats a retreat before a great ordeal fills us with distrust and pity. Something in us rejoices that he has not suffered. But something regrets that he has not given his measure, that he has not been the hero, the potent, exceptional man wehoped he would be. And that is not a mere perversion of our need for the spectacular: we are not less exacting with ourselves.
When sorrow comes to us, and we manage to escape it, the first sense of deliverance we feel is marred by an obscure, obstinate regret, as if we had lost an opportunity to enrich ourselves.
Tell me, what man among us did not, at the outset of the present great catastrophe, interrogate his own fate with a double anguish: the anguish to know what sufferings were in store for him, the fear also that he might not suffer enough, that he might not receive, and quickly, an adequate share of the ordeal.
This religious respect we experience in the face of grief gives its meaning and beauty to the feeling of sympathy.
We do not wish to admit that a great grief can live side by side with us without demanding that we should share it. As a man of lowly station wistfully approaches the table of princes, so we revolve about the grief of others in the hope of being invited to partake of it.
It is an overmastering impulsion that rises from the depths of our natures. The eagerness we are able to bring to the sharing of others’ joys is butlukewarm beside the insurmountable urge that makes us share in their sorrow.
This is because our taste for joy is stamped with a keen quality of reserve, an irreducible delicacy. The joy even of those who are nearest to us can easily become repugnant to us. We are too proud to seem eager for it. True grief, on the contrary, attracts us, fascinates us. It disarms our critical sense and leaves us only an obscure feeling of envy.
Sympathy stirs us gently without overwhelming us; it is for this reason too that we find it so full of savor.
Although we recoil from the terrors of the leading part, sympathy permits us to play passionately the rôle of supernumeraries.
It is not we who are struck down and yet we can taste the mystic horror of the wound. The chosen victim bestows alms upon us and we accept them without shame. We have the perfume of the Host on our lips and it is not our blood that has paid the sacrifice. We are the guests at a sumptuous and tragic feast. We bear the reflected light of the great funeral pyre, without undergoing the flames and the destruction.
That explains our leaning toward those works of art that find their strength and their subjects in human grief. It is for this reason, surely, that welove so dearly to shed tears at the theater. The great artists have drawn from grief their most beautiful inspirations. We vow eternal gratitude to those who can revive in us a faithful image of our torments and call them back to our forgetful souls, to those who know so well how to give us a foretaste of the delights that future suffering has in store for us.
Not all griefs exalt us and add to us. There are some that are sterile, withering, unconfessable.
Such griefs bring only misery and impoverishment. In the moral order they stand for debts and failures. However great may be our blind indulgence for ourselves, we cannot, on principle, impute them to ourselves. They do not bear the stamp of destiny but of our own baseness.
Who, indeed, would wish to share them with us, when we do not even let them appear?
Who would wish to associate himself with our weaknesses, our shames, our jealousies, our betrayals? Who can feel sympathy for a grief that disavows everything pure and generous that exists in us? No mention is made of these griefs in the Beatitudes.
Christ himself might ask us to kiss the face of aleper. But what charity could so sacrifice itself as to embrace our shame and our degradation?
That is the cup we must put away from our lips.
The stoics pursue their strange happiness with an impassibility that is worse than death. Epictetus writes: “If you love an earthen vessel, tell yourself that you love an earthen vessel, for then if that vessel is broken you will not be troubled by it. If you love your son or your wife, tell yourself that you love a mortal being, for then if that being chance to die you will not be troubled by it.”
Comes our wisdom at such a price? If so, I renounce and abhor it. Better trouble and sorrow than this inhuman serenity!
Certainly I willingly renounce the earthen vessel; the sound of its breaking will never be loud enough to interrupt the conversation our souls pursue. But those dear faces that are my horizon, my heaven and my homeland, can I think without anguish of losing them forever? How irreparably I should despise myself if, on that condition, I succeeded in winning my own salvation!
This philosophy is poor, forsaken, desperate, rather than truly wise. It renounces, by degrees, everything, for the sake of an ironical peace. Itwithdraws from life the least debatable motives for continuing it. It seeks to close the heart to sorrow. But since that remains inevitable, it is better to love it, better to make an ally of it, better to conquer it by main strength and possess it intimately.
Dryness of heart cannot be a good thing. What, is everything to be taken away from me, even my grief, even that grief which remains to us when all other blessings have been ravished away?
The resources of philosophy are poor and destitute unless the heart can anoint them, sanctify them, and invest them with its own supreme authority.
The fanaticism of grief is a fact so profoundly human that religions and governments have exploited it successfully. This almost mystical passion flourishes so well among peoples that are permeated with the ancient traditions of suffering and renunciation!
Nevertheless, the path does not lie through this sublime error, which is altogether too favorable for the enterprises of criminal ambition.
Sorrow cannot be a thing that one covets. It is, it ought to be, simply a thing that one accepts. Like certain terrible dignities, like certain overwhelming honors, one receives it, one does not seek it. Destiny brings a sufficient burden of mourning and cruelty, it should not be tempted. The noblelife demands that we shall be courageous, it does not require us to be foolhardy. To him who “seeks while he groans,” suffering will never be wanting.
At this hour the whole world is intoxicated with it, satiated, it would seem, for all time. At this hour there rises an immense cry of pity and supplication.
All generous souls are wounded to the quick and stagger. It is not in the moment when they beg for mercy that one would desire a superaddition of martyrdom. It is enough to assume the sanguinary wealth with which we are overwhelmed.
No one will ever be deprived of it who lives for love. We shall all be honored according to our merits. And we shall know that grief is its own reward; for it is in sorrow and abnegation that our soul becomes supremely aware of the beauty of the world and of its own virtues.
We cannot ask to be indemnified for our riches....
In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children!
It is true! Our child was born in sorrow, in your sorrow, O my friend! I am jealous because of it. Forgive me!
Forgive me, for your part is more beautiful than mine, inasmuch as it contains more suffering. Letme look upon you with envy. Let me think of my own lot with regret.
You have borne, you have brought forth, you have nourished. It was not in my side that this little body lay. It is not my flesh this tender, greedy mouth has clung to. I have known nothing of that suffering. You have kept it all for yourself. I have only picked up the crumbs, like a beggar, like a pauper.
I have not suffered! I have not suffered enough! I look on my happiness as upon something usurped. It is your happiness that I share. It is your wealth that overflows even upon me.
I know that a day may come when we shall both suffer together because of this son. But whatever may be our common anguish, you will always keep the first place, you will always walk before me. You have forever outdistanced me along the shining road.
How can I help regarding you with envy, I who have not suffered enough?
Exalted spirits, struck by our many resemblances to the beasts, have striven to find what was the distinguishing mark of man. It is a noble solicitude, for wheresoever the mark of men may be it is that way we must go. If we really possess a characteristicvirtue of which the animals are deprived, it is that which we must exalt, in order to be completely, proudly, men.
Pascal said: “Man is obviously made to think; and his whole dignity, his whole merit, and his whole duty lies in thinking rightly.”
Can we indeed believe that no other being has this grandeur to any degree? Are we so sure that “a tree does not know it is miserable”?
Even art, which may turn out to be the instrument of our redemption, is not certainly the lot of our race alone. Song and the dance triumph among the animals and often appear like the beautiful inventions of a gratuitous activity, with no other end than themselves and the emotions they give or interpret.
In renunciation, perhaps, lies our distinction, the trait which stamps us and sets us apart.
I say “perhaps,” because animals also offer us examples of abnegation. Sacrifice beautifies even their habits. With them, too, the individual sacrifices himself for the group, the hero sacrifices itself for the race. At the moment when I am writing these lines we are in autumn; a swarm of bees is dying of cold on a branch beside me. They are dying with a sort of resignation, in order that their hive, so poor in resources, may survive the winter.
Why not share, then, with these humble victims,our most beautiful quality? Why refuse to possess something in common with them, since it is a virtue? Why cut ourselves off haughtily from the rest of life?
Over and above this, the renunciation that has no particular or general motive of interest, the pure and absolute renunciation which is a heroic folly, is undoubtedly our business. I am not speaking now of the renunciation of the better religions, the renunciation that counts on celestial rewards, but of the renunciation which is an end in itself, which finds in itself its own sorrowful recompense.
Can we ever forget, my friend, that woman who was the lesson of your youth, your counsellor and your example?
She lived in that dark, low room where you so loved to go and to which you used to show me the way, a way that seemed to me that of veneration itself.
Disillusionments, griefs, sickness and, without doubt, a great need for renunciation had gradually sequestered her in that unlovely place of refuge, encumbered with old books and full of the odor of dust. She seemed cut off from the world; but in the shadow of that retreat her eye sparkled so vivaciously, she spoke with so melodious a voice thatthe world pursued her who had abandoned it even into her retirement: the friendship of young people, that friendship which is so pure and spontaneous, was for her a constant testimony. This was the only thing she would not renounce, her only ornament, her last elegance, her possession.
Year by year death came to snatch from her affection those of her own blood. Every sort of happiness withdrew from her as she retired into her abode, light itself she dreaded more and more, and more and more renounced.
Every time we passed through her little door, so slow in opening, we had at first an insurmountable feeling of being suffocated, for we were still intoxicated with our radiant life, our destiny and our ambitions.
But soon our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, our souls recognized the humble, penetrating odor of the hangings, and we found again that beautiful, commanding glance, that voice with its supernatural freshness.
Her malady struck her new blows. This woman who still possessed the space of three rooms had to shut herself in one of them. And then, even of this she possessed no more than a corner. Her world was only a little wall and the wood of an old bed.
That ardent eye still shone. That spiritual voice still prevailed. One day the voice falteredand sank, like a ship disabled in a storm which gives up all resistance.
That day we were sad, sad, we who had not learned to renounce.
Delivered from romanticism, the nineteenth century toward its close and the twentieth century at its beginning, exalted an image full of the pride of physical life, of impetuous health.
Never had humanity seemed more intoxicated with its carnal development, with its splendid animality, than at the very moment when the war broke out. Our humanity! behold it now, covered with wounds so deep that for long decades the sight of them will baffle us and fill our pity with despair.
Behold it now, like a vast race of invalids. It creeps over a world where now there are more graveyards than villages.
We have had an unparalleled experience of sorrow and renunciation.
And yet the desire for happiness is deeply rooted: the unanimous voice to which our world listens repeats, from amid the sobs: “We shall renounce nothing!”
To him who listens with an attentive ear, it says again, it says particularly: “We shall renounce nothing, not even renunciation!”
But let us leave this immense grief to itself. Let us leave it to satiate and appease itself with its own contemplation—Silence!