Georges Duhamel

“ What man, tell me, what man, were he suddenly delivered from disgust with himself, from terror of the world, from the sadness of an age that is without pity, from remorse for a thing he has done, from the fear of things he has to do, what man, suffering from one of these evils, or from several of them or from all at once, would not experience an immense relief, would not feel a certain absolution for the errors of the universe, a certain alleviation of his own in the contemplation of this little osier-bed which I descry this evening, at the turning of a lane? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And you have felt yourself once more in possession of a treasure that was escaping you.
It is true, all these thoughts are your own, since it is enough for you to see them in writing to recognize them. It is true, you too have your grandeur, your nobility and infinite resources. How could you have forgotten it for a moment? It is enough for you to open that book or to hum that song to remember it. It is true, your life also is astonishing and full of adventures. How did you fall into that despair? ”

“ All convictions and all certitudes are at one another’s throats. How can we recognize them, with that lost look they have, that blood that soils and disfigures them? In the hurricane, opinions, uprooted, have lost their soil and their sap. They drift like autumn thistles, dry thistles that yet have power to tear the skin. Men no longer know anything but their insurmountable suffering, a suffering that has no limit and seems to be without reason. They groan and desire nothing but to be alleviated. Will a century of pious tenderness suffice to bathe, drain, close the vast wound? ”

“ If we wish it, we may possess the whole universe, and it is in this possession that we shall find the salvation of our souls. We may possess, for example, that unknown something which walks by the road-side, the color of the forest of pointed firs that rises sharply against the southern horizon, the thoughts of Beethoven, our dreams by night, the conception of space, our memories, our future, the odor and the weight of objects, our grief at this moment and thousands and thousands of other things besides. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest.
Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself.
If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy.
Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned.
I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. ”

“ We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.
Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock, a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with bitterness. ”

“ Every time we leave him we like him better, we like ourselves better, we like all humanity better, we look at everything with a smile, we are as full of plans as a tree in April.
The other sort of man, on the contrary, is forever deluding himself. He pursues before our very eyes an end which we see, with grief and bitterness, he regularly fails to attain. Whatever he does, whatever he says, he always shows us that he is a stranger to us, that he is superior and that we do not interest him. ”

“ But we have found once more the key and the path to the secret refuge. Nothing could turn us aside now. Nothing could prevent us at certain hours from plunging into solitude, there to find again the equilibrium, the harmony and those moral riches which we know, after the ruin of so many things, are alone efficacious, alone durable.
For long months now I have realized, watching the men with whom I live, that they are waiting for words of quietude, words of rest and love. They are like parched soil at the end of a blazing summer: they long to slake their thirst and grow green again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of men. So [Pg 8] cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too, that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it.
Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They will know how to render service to you, in their own fashion, repay you in turn. But do not imagine that their works are destined merely to divert your leisure. They have a more sacred, a more beautiful mission: that of placing you in possession of your own wealth.
Art is the supreme gift that men make of their discoveries, their riches.
No one has possessed the world better than Lucretius, Shakespeare or Goethe. What do you know of Croesus, who heaped up his gold to such an abnormal and monstrous degree? Nothing has remained of that chimerical fortune but a vague memory. ”

“ Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us, the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,—that it is one of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes, we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to make us vibrate in harmony. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ You must discover in order to be rich! You must not be satisfied to accept the night good-humoredly, to go to sleep after a day empty of all discovery. There are no small victories, no negligible discoveries: if you bring back from your day’s journey the memory of the white cloud of pollen the ripe plantain lets fall, in May, at the stroke of your switch, it may be little, but your day is not lost. If you have only encountered on the road the tiny urn of jade which the moss delightedly balances at the end of its frail stem, it may seem little, but be patient! ”

“ 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. ”

“ We love solitude, indeed; it is the cold and silent fountain at which our soul is purified and confirmed. But what would it profit us to have amassed great riches, by the help of solitude, if we had no one to whom to offer them?
It is because he feels this anxiety that man seeks a lasting union. Among a thousand generosities, love offers him the opportunity to enjoy companionship without renouncing solitude. A happy home is the solitude of many a soul. The man who has entered into a beautiful union is sure of at least one person to whom he can give the best that he possesses. ”

“ The world contains not one single object that might not be a source of happiness. Sorrow springs from this, that man outdoes himself in misusing everything. He turns against his own body or his own spirit all sorts of things that seem well made for his joy.
Every being contains an unbelievable store of happiness, and this one virtue reveals the angle from which he ought to be judged. ”

“ 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 so with you who possess a family, friends, comrades, and adversaries. It is so with you who are able to draw, without let or hindrance, from the immense well of humankind. You must refuse nothing; you must accept everything, find out the value of everything, store everything away. The world of men is a rich patrimony, the exploitation of which is expressly confided to you. You must not be a bad administrator, you must make all your land bring forth its fruit. ”

“ That man does not see only within the limits of his own flesh. He fills in his own self almost the whole universe, participates gloriously in the infinite.
I know that it often happens that the beautiful ship sees its sails sinking in distress and no longer feels its ropes trembling in the wind. The time comes when it stops painfully in the stupor and indifference of noon.
The time comes when the rich man suddenly finds himself on Job’s dung-heap. The time comes when, without reason, grace deserts the heart. ”

“ We already know that competition will be pitiless, we know too that enjoyment will only be for the highest bidder. Individuals, at the sight of this future, mutually urge one another to be stubborn. The world is preparing to take up again, obstinately, the old order that has cost it so many trials. As yet no one speaks of a new life.
There will be so many voices to praise these desperate resolutions, so many books will be written to persuade men to persevere in their old hatreds that a timid voice may well raise itself to protest against the consummation of the error. ”

“ Your poverty seemed unlimited, for it could not be palliated by more money, an improvement in your health or the renewal of a broken friendship. And yet, nevertheless, you suddenly breathed in the wind an imperceptible odor, familiar, charged with memories, you suddenly encountered in the color of a house, or in the look of an unknown face, some mysterious sign, and you felt that your wealth had been given back [Pg 150] to you, that it flowed through you once more as the saving blood returns to the heart of the dying man. ”

“ What compensation will be left for our passion of today if we take up all our prejudices again, if we return to our own vomit?
The old civilization seems condemned. To break with it, we must first of all seek our individual satisfaction outside money, our happiness outside the whirlpool of pleasure. We must flee deliberately from the tyranny of luxury. In this way even the events of the present oblige us to seek our true path. Must we keep blindly and obstinately to the ways of slavery? We have slighted the best sources of interest, joy and wealth ”

“ There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart, the tiny lantern in my hand. ”

“ Truly, we are equally guilty every time we turn an object aside from its mission, which is altogether one of happiness. We are guilty again every time we fail to extract, for others and for ourselves, all the happiness an object holds in store and only asks to be allowed to yield.
II
It is because every fragment of the earth is a source of happiness that men ceaselessly dream of winning that source for their own profit.
They do not wish to have all humanity refresh itself, plunge its feverish face and lips in the cool waters. ”