Part 8

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.

IV

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 sovereign imprint. 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 misunderstood or 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.

V

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 in memory, 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?

VI

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.

VII

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.

IX

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 more fertile 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 the present, 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 of their 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’.”

X

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, “do you 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.

XI

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 that heavy 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.

VIII THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES

I

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?

What is there so profound, so divine in that scene?

Nothing, nothing, no doubt. Everything, perhaps. For who would venture to maintain that there is anything in the world that might not be a sign for my heart and yet be nothing more? I was following a stone wall, an indecipherable wall at present, without significance, without compassion, an enemy. It shut in my view and my thoughts, it was covered with cold mosses and all the dampness of winter. And then, all at once, the wall ended and there was a little valley crowned with these osiers. Yes, I mean crowned, for it seemed as if all its desires had been granted, all its aspirations satisfied, all its prayers fulfilled.

Thousands of crimson branches rose in a chorus toward heaven, like clusters of some smooth, straight, up-springing coral. All the branches rose together, with one brotherly impulse, like the desires of a world freed from ambitions and vowed to the one, the noblest ambition of all. But why seek for words, why strive to paint it? Surely it was not the flaming sap of the young shoots any more than the little rivulets smoking like censers at their feet,--it was neither of these things that promised relief and deliverance. It was the entire world that manifested itself in this, its smallest fragment, just as the most secretive man will betray himself by the trembling of his little finger or the flutter of an eyelash.

II

I was once saved by the tarpaulin of a humble delivery wagon. That tarpaulin certainly knew no more about it than did the men who owned it, or had the use of it here below. There are, in every object, qualities we are ignorant of and that are precisely those through which this object fulfils its most beautiful rôle in the universe, those to which it inclines as if toward some miraculous purpose, which are indeed its vocation and its true destiny.

I remember it was a morning in February, one of those hopeless mornings which we feel do not deserve the evening and will hardly attain it. I do not know what I had done to myself or to my men to have so completely lost all courage and purpose; but that morning I was certainly the most destitute of beings and the least worthy of an act of grace.

Yet for all that, grace was shown me, for that marvelous tarpaulin appeared. It was of heavy canvas, yellow and green. Its color, its folds, its whole appearance, the form it concealed, in fact I know not what element in it, showed me that I still could live, that my faults were forgiven me, that nothing about me was irremediable.

I am willing to pass for a man who is eager for forgiveness, a man who is satisfied with little. We wish to set our own value on everything, as if the things of the spirit meant the same thing as money, as if they did not depend upon quite another spirit than that of the accountants and geometricians.

I met a priest,--it was since the war began,--with whom I often talked about penance and contrition. I asked him one day what price he would ask for the remission of the heaviest burden on one’s conscience. He answered without hesitation: “Three paters and three aves.” This man was corrupted by the customs of the world and its authorities. He filled me with a sort of desire to insult him, and I confess I gave him some rude shocks. Since then I have reflected. I have not become reconciled to the memory of that priest, but I believe that grace touches us in a most unforeseen way; it shines out suddenly, without any reason, like the radiant blue in a sky where one has not expected it. It manifests itself without regard to the efforts we make to deserve it, and the occasions it selects are not in proportion to our distress. But how sovereign it is, how much the most desirable of all blessings!

Remember, remember! you were walking through the streets, a prey to some irremediable pain. 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 to you, that it flowed through you once more as the saving blood returns to the heart of the dying man.

I was walking one day along the banks of the Aisne, the prey of an illimitable mental torture which, just because there was no reason for it, seemed incurable. The image of a bridge in the water suddenly gave me back my confidence in myself and my accustomed joyousness. It was only a reflection; but never believe those who tell you that these things are nothing but reflections.

III

When a man who is cruelly wounded in his body or his spirit preserves a cheerful faith and never ceases to be the master of his misfortune, I say that he has grace.

When a true man is able, for an hour, to contemplate without uneasiness his own thoughts and actions, I say that he is touched with grace, and I hope that hour may last a day and that day an entire life.