Paul Claudel

“ We pass groups of banyans; and, in the pond that they shade, a great buffalo, of which we can only see the back and the moon-curved horns, stares at us with eyes of heavy stupor. We pass lines of women going to the fields. When one laughs her mirth spreads and grows feebler on the four faces that follow, and is effaced on the fifth. At the hour when the first ray of the sun traverses the virginal air, we gain the vast and empty plain; and, leaving behind us the tortuous road, we take our way toward the mountain across the fields of rice, tobacco, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, and sugar-cane. ”

“ Tonight, as our ship tossed in the wheat-colored moonlight, at the entrance to the river, what a sign the Dog-Star was to me, low beyond the sea; the golden watchman at the foot of a stretch of stars, glowing splendor at the far horizon! These flowing waters having led us into the heart of the countryside, I disembark, and on my road I see below me the image of the round sun repeated in the fields, ruddy in the green rice.
It is neither cold, nor too warm. All nature has the warmth of my body. ”

“ Oh marvelous harvest, promised to One alone! Fruit shown to that immortal part of us which triumphs!
Before I reach the pines night falls and the cold moon lights me. This seems to me to be the difference: that the sun looks at us, but we look at the moon. Her face is turned away, and like a fire which lights up the bottom of the sea she makes every shadow become visible.... In the heart of this ancient tomb, in the thick grass of this ruined temple, under the form of fair ladies or wise old men, possibly I shall meet a company of foxes! ”

“ With a great quiver, it increases little by little the distance that separates it from the encumbered wharf and the port of seething life. And we follow the heavy tranquil water in its lazy windings. Here is one of the mouths by which the earth disgorges, spewing its thick muddy waters forth to mingle with the tangled grasses of the sea. Of the soil where we once dwelt, there remains only its crude color, ready to liquefy. And, right before us, a fire low down in the limpid air indicates the horizon and the desert. ”

“ Color is the passion of matter; it signalizes the participation of each object in the common source of glory. Design expresses the energy proper to each being; his action, his rhythm, his postures. The one makes manifest his relations to space, the other fixes his movement in time. One gives the form, the other gives the sense. And as the Japanese, careless of relief, paints only by contour and mass, the chief characteristic of his design is a schematic stroke. While the tones are in contrast, the lines are in unity; and while the painting is a harmony, the design is an idea ”

“ What do you fear? Do you not see how the current, accelerating the movement of our boat, leads us on? Why doubt that we shall arrive, and that endless day will respond to the brightness of such a promise? I foresee that the sun will rise, and that I must prepare to sustain its power. Oh light, drown all transitory things in the depth of thy abyss!
Let noon come, and it will be vouch-safed me to meditate, Summer, upon thy reign, and to include the whole day in my perfected joy, as I sit amid the peace of all the earth in the harvest solitudes. ”

“ The sun sets on a day of peace and labor, yet men, women, and children, their disheveled hair full of dust and wisps of straw, their faces and legs stained with earth, work on. Here they cut rice, here they gather up the sheaves; and, as on wall-paper the same scene is repeated indefinitely, so on every side we see great wooden vats with men who, face to face, beat ears of corn against the sides; and already the plow commences to turn the clay again. All about is the odor of grain, the perfume of the harvest. At the end of the plain where the men are working is a wide river ”

“ While the air is rejoicing in perfect stillness, at the hour when the sun is consummating the mystery of noon, then the great bell, with its sonorous and concave expanse swung to the point of melody by the blows of its cedarn hammer, rings with the rolling earth; and soon its sound, receding and advancing, has crossed mountain and plain until a wall which one can see on the far horizon, with a series of Cyclopean doors piercing it at symmetrical intervals, hems in the volume of its resounding thunder and forms the frontier of its clamor. In one corner of this enclosure a city is built. ”

“ Well, then, I shall play on the flute, I shall beat the tom-tom; and the boat-woman, standing on one leg like a stork while with the other knee she supports her nursing baby as she conducts her sampan across the flat waters, will believe that the gods behind the drawn curtains of the clouds are enjoying themselves in the courts of their temple.
Or, unlacing my shoe, I shall throw it across the lake. Where it falls the passer-by will prostrate himself; and, having picked it up with superstitious awe, he will honor it with four sticks of incense. ”

“ The earth has received its fill of water; the soaked leaves breathe freely. As for me, under this somber and friendly sky I know the compunction and peace which one feels after having wept. Facing me is a wall with an uneven coping, where three square windows open, each crossed with porcelain bars imitating bamboo. As they adjust a “grille” over diplomatic papers, which isolates the important words, so they have applied this screen of triple openings to the wide countryside of trees and water, and have reduced it to a single theme repeated as in a triptych. ”

“ He is a trumpet on the march, ever seeking; and to every odor that he scents he applies his pump-like body. He sucks it in. When he has found the necessary hole, he wallows enormously. This is not the wriggling of a duck who enters the water. It is not the sociable happiness of the dog. It is a deep, solitary, conscientious, integral enjoyment. He sniffs, he sips, he tastes, and you cannot say whether he eats or drinks. Perfectly round, with a little quiver, he advances and buries himself in the unctuous center of the fresh filth. ”

“ By the dark roads of the villages, among pines and tombs, and along the far-stretched fields, I am the setting sun. Neither the happy plain nor the harmony of these mountains, nor the alluring color of the verdure on the ruddy harvest, can satisfy the eye which demands light itself. Below in that square moat, enclosed by the mountain with a rude wall, the air and the water burn with a mysterious fire. I see a gold so beautiful that all nature seems to me a dead mass ”

“ Nearly a million inhabitants live here. I listen to the speech of this multitude far under a lake of air. It is a clamor at once torrential and crackling, shot through with sudden abrupt rips like the tearing of paper. I am sure one can distinguish now and then a note and its modulations, as one does a chord on a drum, by putting his fingers on the right places. Has the city a different murmur at different times in the day? I propose to test it. At this moment it is evening. They are volubly publishing the day’s news. Each one believes that he alone is speaking. ”

“ I remain motionless, and from time to time an apple from the tree falls like a ripe and heavy thought.
[Pg 89]
HEAT
Today is more arduous than the Inferno. Out of doors is an overpowering sun. A blinding splendor devours all the shade, a splendor so steady that it seems solid. I see in everything around me less of immobility than of stupor, an arrested effort. For the earth in these four moons has completed her production. It is time that her spouse kill her, and, unveiling the fire with which he burns, condemn her with an inexorable kiss. ”

“ One might say that it was dovetailed into the horizon. With thy hand, December, caress these large adornments, tufts of black pine like brooches against the hyacinth of the plain; verify with thy fingers these details sunk in the enmeshing fog of this winter day: a row of trees, a village. Truly the hour is arrested. Like an empty theater, abandoned to melancholy, the sealed-up countryside seems to listen for a voice so shrill that I cannot hear it.
These afternoons in December are sweet. Nothing speaks as yet of the tormenting future, and the past is not yet so dead that it has no survivals. ”

“ The city is entirely of human beings. It seems an article of faith with the Chinese not to employ an animal or a machine for work by which a man may live. This explains the narrowness of the streets, the stairs, the curved bridges, the houses without fences, the sinuous windings of the alleys and passages. The city forms a coherent whole, an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill. When the night comes, every one barricades himself. During the day there are no doors, that is to say no doors that close. ”

“ Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously under accumulated clouds,—still the torches flare at the prow, the festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a vivid note,—as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers [Pg 23] explode, the three boatmen lean to the long scull. ”

“ Scarcely a fire pricks the dusk and the mist beneath me, and by a road I know, slipping into the funereal darkness of the pines, I gain my habitual post, this great triple tomb blackened with moss and age, oxidized like armor, which thrusts its frowning parapet obliquely into space.
I come here to listen.
Chinese cities have neither factories nor vehicles. The only noise that can be heard, when evening comes and the fracas of trade ceases, is the human voice. ”

“ Far from disturbing sleep, this fire rising from the midst of darkness creates it, overpowering my senses more profoundly. But not in vain, like a priest awakened for his midnight mass, have I come from my bed to survey this mysterious mirror. The light of the sun is a force of life and of creation, and our vision partakes of its energy; but the splendor of the moon is like thought meditating upon itself. I contemplate her alone, lost to sound and heat; and all creation paints itself black beneath her brilliant expanse. ”

“ He deprives me of the sacred mirror in him that was made for my reflection. Let us fly, then, let us hide this beauty that is not honored!” Like a dove which slips into a hole in a wall, she descended into a deep cavern at the mouth of the river Yokigawa and, with an enormous rock, hermetically sealed the enclosure.
It grew dark—not the ordinary blackness of night, but the very darkness there was before the world was made. Crude and atrocious blackness filled the living earth. ”

“ Before the golden Buddha in the leaves, time is measured by the burning of a little candle; and in the depth of this ravine, by the dripping of a triple fountain.
Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure, and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature ”

“ At the street corners, at the bends of heavy little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood, color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate light. The door at our left is simply a round hole. ”

“ The trees and the flowers conspire to my captivity; and, as in a child’s game the player must continually go back and begin again, so all the turns in this thick grass lead me to that furthest corner, where the wells are. Across the little hill, by means of a long cord, I shake the invisible pail. Like a ripening fruit, like a poet maturing his thought, I rest in the immobility all about me where life is measured only by the circling of the sun, by the beating of my pulse,—by the growth of my hair. ”

“ Arriving from the horizon, our ship is confronted by the wharf of the Earth; and the continent, emerging, spreads its immense architecture out before us. In the morning distinguished by one great star, as I mount the gangway the earth’s blue apparition appears before my eyes. To defend the sun against the pursuit of the restless ocean, this continent has established the deep-set solidity of its ramparts. Their breaches open into a happy countryside.
For a long time in the full daylight we follow the frontier of another world. ”

“ An opium den, a market of prostitutes, these last fill the framework of my memory. The smoking den is a vast nave, empty all the height of two stories which superimpose their balconies inside. The building is full of blue smoke, one breathes an odor of burning chestnuts. It is a heavy perfume, powerful, stagnant, strong as the beat [Pg 16] of a gong. Sepulchral smoke, it establishes between our air and dreams a middle atmosphere which the seeker of these mysteries inhales. One sees across the haze the fire of little opium lamps like the souls of the smokers. ”