Part 3

Chapter 34,216 wordsPublic domain

Yes, Elise was more beautiful than a woman. I thought I was looking at a divinity. I thought I was becoming a god. My mouth took possession of her mouth, and my left arm supported her head, while my right hand sought under the agitation of her bosom the beating of the heart that I desired. It became dark night except in my head and in my senses, and it seemed to me that Elise was mine, and that cries left our moist and trembling mouths. But perhaps it was only an illusion. And yet, I perfectly remember that, when the light came back, our eyes were full of gratitude and of understanding. Moreover, we were now so close to one another that we seemed but a single body.

Insensibly we recovered our former attitudes. The little one, when once more we looked at the external world, was sleeping on her friend's knees, and our master was meditating, his head on his hand. What had passed before us, what mysterious accomplishment, I did not then think of asking myself, and now, if I were to ask, I should not know what to answer. Illusion had doubtless buried us all alike in a rain of roses, and the magician had not escaped his own magic.

The great happiness I felt quickened my intelligence. When our master began to speak again, I felt that a soft beam of sunlight was falling upon me.

I told you that the religion of the ancient Greeks was that which translated with least ugliness and least falsity the true state of the world which is invisible to you. There are gods, that is to say, a race of men as superior to other men as you are superior to the most intelligent or the best domesticated animals. You have conquered the earth; my ancestors conquered space, and colonised the greater number of the planets that gravitate round the sun. Our possible domain does not extend beyond the solar system; our actual domain does not stretch beyond Jupiter, where my father dwells, and its limit in the direction of the sun is this earth upon which we are. For a great number of centuries I have chosen Mars as a resting-place, and this brought me near you, and gave me certain humane inclinations. The other planets, by reason either of their distance from or of their nearness to the sun, are inaccessible to me, almost as much so as to yourselves. I do not know what goes on in them. As for the infinite worlds which are spread beyond our sphere, they are for me as for you the unknown and the unknowable.

What I have just told you will not seem very new. Many of your philosophers have had imaginations that at some point touched this truth. Voltaire made Micromegas to tease you; but, submitting to the appearances of physical laws, he made an immoderate giant of him. Why so? Are not the ants, next to men, the most intelligent of terrestrial animals? I think I remember that at a far-distant epoch, that your geologists call, I believe, the coal age, the termites displayed on your globe a sort of genius. These little beings, so fragile, were cut short in their development by the lowering of the temperature. They no longer live but with a slackened vitality, like other insects; their intelligence, no longer nourished by an abundant physical activity, has congealed; they stopped at a point thenceforth impassable for them, and what they once accomplished by choice and will, they now no longer do except mechanically. But let us leave Micromegas....

I Micromegas has almost ceased to interest us. You have said, a little quickly for my intelligence, many things that would delight me if I better understood them. This slackened life ....

Terrestrial life is precarious since it is at the mercy of atmospherical circumstances. Animals that have not a very high temperature are destined to expend their strength in a perpetual labour of adaptation. If the original heat had increased instead of diminishing, the termites and the ants would perhaps be two great nations, sharing between them the empire of the world, and man would be one of their preys. But you discovered the art of fire and raised yourself above all other animals. Fire, in giving you a constant summer, also gave you leisure. Thence your civilisations, proud daughters of idleness, who deny their mother. It is from idleness that everything has been born among men. From the year in which one of your ancestors was able to pass the winter beside his fire, date the arts, the sciences, games, love, all delights. Leisure is indeed the greatest and the most beautiful of man's conquests. But, though you have known how to conquer, though you have known how to create, you have scarcely ever known how to use your conquests or your creations. After conquering leisure, you disdained it, and slaves, ashamed of the inactivity of their domesticated hands, set themselves to preach among you the sanctity of labour. Poor madmen! And are you not already on the way to spoil woman? Have you not already succeeded in insinuating into her heart the shameful principles of Jewish morality? Have you not resolved, in your narrow masculine pride, to undo the work of your ancestors and to reduce to the position of mean and lesser men these creatures who used to dominate you with all their beauty and with all their tenderness? You educate them; you teach them the useless stupidities that make your own brains ugly; soon you will forbid them ornament, you will forbid them love, you will forbid them to make you happy! But I will take up this discourse later. It is a digression due to your curiosity. We were speaking of Micromegas. Well, I am, if you will, Micromegas, reduced to our human proportions. No more than he have I absolute power over men; I cannot even crush them, like that Titan, in absent-mindedness or in pleasure. I have scarcely any power over men: I can, when I strongly wish it, insinuate into them some few of my ideas. It is this that men have called my incarnations. I have never become incarnate. My own flesh, almost immortal, and almost incorruptible, suffices me.

Almost....

The gods are born and die, so my father has told me. I have not seen one die, I have not seen one born. But I was born, since I have a father and a mother.

Your mother Mary....

Credulous and inattentive child! What matter the successive names that are given us by men? The Greeks called my mother Latona; they knew me under the name of Apollo. Their religion was full of fables, but they were not ignorant of the essence of things. I know nothing of how the elementary truths were revealed to them. Perhaps my father, in primitive ages.... I did not begin to busy myself with men until about the time of Pythagoras. I inspired him with some happy ideas; he passed for divine, and is one of the rare disciples for whom I have never had to blush. Pythagoras civilised the shores of the Mediterranean. His thought, sustained by me, hovered like a light white cloud over the blue waves of that maternal sea.

But Epicurus was perhaps still nearer to my heart. His natural and more genial sensibility produced, under my breath, a more beautiful intellectual flower. He knew one part of wisdom, and was not the dupe of analogies. Intelligent, he did not go and suppose a universal intelligence, inventing systems, poems, and useful practices for the happiness of man; he did not go and suppose a supreme creator. He understood that the temperaments of men are diverse, and did not advise a uniform pleasure. He taught pleasure, that is to say the art of being happy according to one's nature. I loved Epicurus. I showed myself to him in the form of an older friend, a traveller who wandered over the world in search of wisdom. Once or twice a year, he saw me arrive with joy, put his slaves at my orders, did not hide from me his wife, who for a long time was pretty, and for whom I felt a tender friendship. She was only jealous of her husband's tenderness, and never prevented him from enjoying the caresses of a beautiful stranger. She herself was insensible neither to Ionian nor to Asiatic beauty, and this pure and charming couple often partook of pleasures that they did not give to each other. I accepted these voluptuous customs; the indulgent night more than once heard our sighs mingle with those of the sea which came to break its perfumed waves at our feet.

These things occurred at the hour when the young slaves came, before going to sleep, to wash away on the beach the stains of the day's work. They played, they laughed, and we loved to join them in the water, still warm from the fires of the afternoon. Tired by a long philosophical talk, we found a singular refreshment in the caresses of the waves, and a strength that we willingly abandoned in the arms of the young women. Then they came and sat beside us on the sand, and sang, while we dreamed of nature increate. These songs did not fail to attract an ardent youth; we knew it, and when we were rested and refreshed, we went and stretched ourselves upon our mats, letting new pleasures be born, new flowers, in place of those we had plucked.

My friend, the teachers who poison your sensibility and stifle your intelligence have made you believe for some centuries past that the pleasure of Epicurus was a pleasure wholly spiritual. Epicurus had too much wisdom to disdain any kind of pleasure. He wished to know, and he knew, all enjoyments that may become human enjoyments; he abused nothing but made use of everything in his harmonious life.

It was during the early hours of one of those happy evenings that we found, a result of long meditations, of long discussions, the atomic system. It was a great intellectual achievement, the greatest that has ever been produced among you or outside your sphere. To conceive the world as the product of a series of accidents, that is to say of a series of facts rebounding to infinity one on another, is a conclusion at which the noblest minds of your time dare hardly stop, although it attracts them. Twenty centuries of Platonism have so deranged man's understanding that the simple truths no longer find a footing in it. And yet, all the systems that you have imagined can be disproved, and that of Epicurus cannot. Would you like me to explain it to you, not as your professors of philosophy have defaced it, but as we established it in our Ionian evenings?

We scarcely know the system of Epicurus but by Lucretius' poem....

The most beautiful, perhaps, of the works of men.... Ah! if men had chosen for Bible that admirable book!

Ought we to recognise in it a little of your thought?

Much, my friend, much. It was I who guided the young Lucretius towards Zeno, from whose mouth he learnt to love and understand our Epicurus. I found again in this sombre Roman genius something of the voluptuous habit of mind that ennobled Epicurus, a similar desire of knowledge, and at the same time a respect for the secret movements of life. His existence would have been that of a dreamer, if the future had not tormented him with his passions. He was loved, and was persecuted by jealousy, he, who asked nothing from his mistress but peace for his flesh and peace for his thought. He loved. Love made an observer of the dreamer. He wished to learn the cause of love, and learnt that love was life itself; he wished to learn the cause of life, and learnt that life, that is to say eternal movement, was its own cause. The great adventures of ambition that he witnessed also did much to detach him from social pleasures. The actions of animals, so simple, so precise, seemed to him more interesting than the bloody combats of a few madmen who bought by a crime the certainty of dying by a crime. At the time when he wrote his poem, I was almost his only guest at his villa Lucretia, not far from Albanum. It was a farm rather than a pleasure-house, and often, returning from a walk, we lent a hand in the harvest or the vintage. Memmius, if he was there, watched us or played with the girls. Memmius was a mundane sage and rather libertine. In the evening we took up our talk again. I revealed to him in their entirety the mysteries that Zeno, very jealous, had half hidden from him. On my next visit he read me the last pages of the poem, and I recognised with joy in this language, less supple but more solid than the Greek, the ideas and the genius of the noble Epicurus: "Ancestress of the Romans, O joy of men and gods, noble Venus, it is thou who, under the vault of heaven where the stars revolve, dost people the ship-carrying sea and the fruit-bearing earth; to thee all that has life owes its birth and its sight of the light of the sun....

"At thy coming, O goddess, the winds take flight, and the clouds retire....

"For thee the earth scatters the scent of her flowers, for thee laugh the waves of the deep...."

Lucretius is now but lightly valued among men. He is held immoral, having spoken of love without hypocrisy and of death without illusions.

Yes, he knew too many things wounding to your childish sensibility.

I remember a sentence of Bossuet, a sentence that implies a scorn of antiquity: "As soon as the cross began to appear in this world, all that men used to adore on the earth was buried in oblivion. The world opened its eyes and was astonished at its ignorance...."

And it is I! It is I! So many absurdities in my name!... But our young women have fallen asleep, their hair mingled with the flowers they were arranging. Let them be. Take away these lilacs which would give them headaches. O divine creatures, you know all, knowing love, and you have no need of our vain philosophies.

He rose, and, walking round the table, kissed all three upon the cheek. Then he sat down again beside me, and spoke:

I shall not tell you what matter is; I do not know. Matter is that which is, that which has always been, that which will always be. With Epicurus, I conceived it as an infinity of atoms, or of points, meeting at hazard, and forming groups here and there; it appears to me now more like a tissue, but that comes to the same thing, since there must always be space between the continuous elements of this tissue. Otherwise we should have a mass, immobile, and consequently inert. One cannot suppress space, whose reality, however, it is impossible to conceive; for if space is empty it is nothing, and yet without this nothingness nothing could exist.

In admitting matter in the form of a tissue, we suppose an infinity of lines cutting each other in all ways; but a line is made up of points. Let us return then to points; that is clearer, though not much so.

Your chemistry believed that it reached the limits of analysis, in discovering the molecules that it counts and weighs. But it is evident that a ponderable point can be cut into two points equally ponderable, and so on to infinity, and so on without limit of space or of time. There would be, then, two infinites: one above us, since every number can be increased; the other below us, since every number can be diminished. However, since space must be considered as an absolute void, as a perfect nothingness, as nothing, it is possible that each of these two infinites would abut sharply on this void, on this nothing. The world is perhaps limited. This tissue is, perhaps, a sphere isolated in the midst of the nothingness. As one does not well see how something can come out of the nothingness, or how something can become nothingness, we shall conclude that the eternity of matter coincides with the eternity of this nothingness. In this way we shall have being and not-being. But, as not-being is perfectly inconceivable though necessary to the existence of being, we shall leave it aside; what else should we do with it?

I am aware that one of your learned men has lately been able to speak with a certain logic of the final annulment of matter; I do not think that this idea has a really perceptible meaning, either for men or for gods. What is, is. Disintegration, moreover, does not signify destruction, but change. The face of things has changed and will change again, but the very essence of things is as eternal as chance. This universe is only one of the innumerable tricks of chance, one of the fortuitous moments in the eternal movement ... You find this tedious?

What is more interesting, next to our personal life, than the personal life of the world?

You will die, and the world as you see it will die also. The movement that created it by accident will destroy it by its own continuity. The vulgar eternity that you conceive is only a moment. Have you seen a top spinning? There is a moment, about the middle of its gyration, when the circles described by one of the points on its circumference are all described with a sensibly equal speed. The solar system, by its precision, should make us admit that the top of which we form some of the atoms is pretty nearly half way through its spin. Motion is not perpetual, as you know; so the gyration will go on with necessarily slackening speed, until the top lies down on its side and dies.

Oh! our dreams of eternity!

Do I touch them? A man dies, a man is born. A world dies, a world is born.

Renewal is not eternity.

It is not of eternity you dream, but of immobility. The eternity you have conceived is only a stoppage of movement. What should be conceived is the perpetuity of movement. Men, gods, and worlds; eternal movement walks us for a moment among the infinities of chance.

And so all human effort, our philosophies, our sciences, the dolorous and superb edifice of our civilisations....

Destiny is more beautiful than all civilisations.

But, if they must perish, let their memory at least remain in the intelligence of the gods!

Can the gods survive the world that gave them birth? We are your brothers in mortality. Epicurus knew it. He never considered the gods as other than provisional immortals. Nor had he the singular idea of a unique god, infinite, eternal, &c. That belief had already been imported from Asia into Greece, but the Greeks, not understanding it, presented their whole pantheon in a body with an ironic immortality. Plato and Aristotle took it up, and tried to make it reasonable, but only succeeded in showing more clearly its philosophical inanity. I did not let Epicurus, whom I loved, lose his way in this metaphysic. God is a dream, charming or cruel, useful or dangerous according to the heads in which it reigns, but no more than a dream. Need I explain to you the impossibility of God? God for men is a matter not of reasoning but of sentiment. Your better philosophers have understood him so well that after denying him in their intellects they have hurried to affirm him in their hearts. That is what I should do, perhaps, if we had to remain on the level of humanity; but I am come to raise you above men,--for an instant, before letting you fall back again.

Master, have I displeased you?

Almost all those whom I have raised above the earth have fallen again. The happiest died, some moments before their perjury; the others denied me. But listen. Have you ever reflected on the incontestable mathematical truths? In any case, you know that one is one, and that nothing in the world can make one two, or two one. In the human brain, every impression, every sensation, every image, every idea, must find for lodging a separate habitation. Who then has imagined a central cell to replace the soul? A useless imagination, since this cell could only be a reduction of the brain, as the brain is a reduction of the world. A unique centre of knowledge is an absurd conception; this unique centre is necessarily composed of as many receptive as there are knowable elements. In the same way, God cannot be conceived as a simple being. If he existed, he could exist only in complexity; he would be much like a man, he would be much like me, who am a superman. Multiply yourself to infinity and you have the only really conceivable Almighty. The religions and modest philosophies that have imagined God in the form of a perfect man have at least remained within the limits of a reasonable analogy. I, the one of the gods whom men adore, I tell it you in all divine humility: I am a man and God is a man. You will never transcend this respectable conception without going into the absurd. What is the God of your metaphysicians? An abstraction whose reality is no more possible than that of heat, good, penetrability, truth, beauty, or weight.

The religion of the Greeks was charming, above all in later times; your own has now and then given me some gratification. The Ancients knew the religion of beauty and pleasure, you know that of grace and tenderness. I scorn your philosophies, which are only adroit intellectual structures; I have never been able to scorn your legends and your superstitions, the traditional obeisance that your mind makes to your sensibility. But this is the field reserved for the exercises of the populace, children and timorous women. There are no noble human creatures but those who are in love with themselves and study to extract from their natures all the vain happiness contained in them. Vain but real, and only reality. To know that one has but one life, and that it is limited! There is one hour and only one for gathering the grapes from the vine; in the morning the grape is sour; in the evening it is too sweet. Lose your days neither in weeping for the past nor in weeping for the future. Live your hours, live your minutes. Joys are flowers that the rain will tarnish, or that will throw their petals to the wind.

Epicurus! Epicurus!

Yes, I wish you to be a new Epicurus, and to teach the men of to-day what my friend taught long ago to the Athenians. Apostles have spoken in my name who have succeeded in spreading over the earth a doctrine of despair. They taught the scorn of all that is human, of all that is genial, of all that is luminous. Unfitted for natural pleasures, they sought pleasure in their own misery and in the misery in which they plunged their brothers. They called the earth a valley of tears, but the tears were those whose abundant flow was caused by their own malignity. Baleful to themselves, they were baleful to the men who became the slaves of their sombre dreams. After promising their faithful an eternity of chimerical joys in return for the true and simple joys they stole from them, they took even hope from the heart of man, they imagined hell. Sons of the ancient priests of Baal, they set up in my name the cruel idol of their fathers, and made of me the hideous and prescient creator of those whose destiny was damnation. These monsters, however, did not discourage me, and I sustained by my inspiration every effort of natural wisdom that I saw among all these horrors.

Alas! They hold you yet, and those who combat them, different priests, are sometimes priests more baleful still. Your morality is to-day the lowest and the saddest that has ever reigned. The external hell, in which you now scarcely believe, has entered into your hearts, where it devours all your joys.

Yes, we are sad. In us, the fear of sin has survived the belief in sin. We dare not enjoy anything. We scorn the man who sits down in the sunlight to drink the first rays of the Spring, but while we scorn him we envy him his baseness, for we call all unproductive leisure base. When we can no longer work, we go and watch those who are working.