AUTUMN LEAVES
Neuchâtel, November 1947.
I SHALL be able to say “amen” to anything whatever that happens to me, even if it means to exist no longer, to disappear after having existed. But now I exist and do not understand any too well what that means. I should like to see the matter clearly.
For pity’s sake, leave me alone. I need a little silence around me to obtain peace within myself.
How troublesome you are!… I need to meditate.
“Free-thinking” … X. explains to me that true liberty of thought must be sought on the side of the believer, not on mine.
“For,” he reasoned, “your mind is held on leash by logic.”
I agreed that a remarkable freedom of thought was necessary to believe in the miracles and all that follows; and that I saw very well that his own mind did not revolt against admitting what to me (and to him) appeared contrary to reason. That is even the property of Faith. Where you can not verify or prove, you must believe.
“And if you refuse to believe,” he concluded, “stop telling me and claiming that you love liberty.”
In my heart, I knew very well that I was not a “free-thinker.”
Faith can remove mountains; yes, mountains of absurdities1. To Faith, I do not oppose doubt, but the affirmation: what could not be, is not.
Therefore I shall refuse to consider the finality in nature. According to the best advice, I shall everywhere replace systematically the why by the how. For instance, I know (or at least I have been told) that the substance which the silkworm discharges in forming his cocoon, would poison him if he kept it in him. He expurgates it. It is for his salvation that he empties himself. Which does not prevent the cocoon, which he is obliged to form under penalty of death, and which he would not know how and would be unable to form differently, from protecting the metamorphosis of the caterpillar; and that the latter can only become a butterfly when empty of this silky poison.… But at the same time, I am forced to wonder at the degree to which the how here joins the why, unites with it so closely, cleaves to it so tightly that I can not distinguish one from the other.
It is the same thing for the mollusk and the shell. The same thing everywhere incessantly; in nature, the solution is not separate from the problem. Or better expressed: there is no problem; there are only solutions. Man’s mind invents the problem afterwards. He sees problems everywhere. It’s a scream.1
Ah! if my mind would only drop its dead ideas as a tree its faded leaves! And without too many regrets, if it is possible! Those from which the sap has receded. But in heaven’s name! What beautiful colors!
Those ideas which you think at first you can not do without. From that the great danger of establishing one’s moral comfort on false ideas. Let us examine, let us verify first. Formerly the sun turned around the earth; the latter, a fixed point, remained the center of the world, God’s center of attention … And then, not at all! It is the earth that revolves. But then everything is tottering! Everything is lost!… Nevertheless nothing is changed but the belief. Man must learn to get along without it. He frees himself first from one, then from the other. To get along without Providence: man is weaned.
We are not there yet. That state of complete atheism requires considerable virtue to attain; and even more to maintain. The “believer” will see in it doubtless only an invitation to license. If it were so: long live God! Long live the sacred lie that would preserve mankind from bankruptcy, from disaster. But can not man learn to require from himself by virtue what he thinks required by God? Nevertheless he will have to come to that; some at least, at first; without it, the game would be lost. It will only be won, this strange game we are playing here upon earth (without wanting to, without knowing it, and often against our inclination) if it is to virtue that the idea of God gives place as it recedes; if it is man’s virtue, his dignity, that replaces and supplants God. God exists only by virtue of man. Et eritis sicut dei (That is how I wish to understand that old word of the Tempter—who, like God, exists only in our minds—and see in that offer, that we have been told is fallacious, a possibility of salvation).
God is virtue. But what do I mean by that? It must be defined; I do not succeed very well. I shall only succeed later. But I shall already have done a great deal if I remove God from the altar and put man in his place. Temporarily I think that virtue is the highest an individual can obtain from himself.
God will come later. I persuade myself and repeat constantly: it depends on us. It is through us that God is realized.
What rubbish all this literature is! And even if I should consider only the most successful writings, what business have I, when life is there, with those reflections, those duplicates of life! The only thing that matters to me is what can lead me to modify my way of seeing and acting. To live, all my courage is not too much; to live in this frightful world.… And I know and feel that it is frightful; but I know also that it would be possible for it not to be so, and that it is what we make it. If you denounce the present horror of it, to bring a protest by indignation or disgust, bravo! But if not, away with demoralizers!
There could very well have been nothing; nor anybody. Nobody to notice that there was nothing, and to find that natural.
But what a strange thing that there is something, anything at all.
Something and not a void. Century upon century was necessary to produce this something, to free this something or other from chaos. Still more centuries to obtain the least life. And again still more for this life to reach consciousness. I have ceased to understand, and from its very beginning, this advance, this history. But more incomprehensible than all the rest: unselfishness. Let people go into ecstasies, wrongly without doubt, before the maternal or conjugal abnegation, or altruistical, of the animals; it can be explained, reduced; properly speaking there is nothing disinterested in it; everything follows its inclination and pleasure. I grant it; but it is to wonder all the more when I find these sublime sentiments in man, and capable of gratuitousness. I bend the knee before the slightest act of abnegation, of self-sacrifice for another, for an abstract duty, for an idea. If that is to be the end, the whole world is not too much, all the immense misery of mankind.
They do not admit serenity acquired outside of what they teach. I speak here of the Catholics; every doctrine that departs from their church must end in despair.
As for that serenity on which you plume yourself, you expose it by speaking of it; by exposing it, you compromise it. It is on your countenance and in your acts that one should read it; not in the sentences that you write not knowing why nor for whom.…
Get along without God.… I mean: get along without the idea of God, the belief in an attentive Providence, tutelary and rewarding … all who wish it, do not succeed.
Yet the bat with sunken eyes is able to avoid the wires strung up in the room where he is flying about without colliding with them. And he doubtless feels afar off, in the nocturnal air, the passing of some insect which will furnish his nourishment. He does not fly haphazardly, and his bearing which appears capricious to us, is motivated. Space is full of vibrations, rays, that our senses can not perceive, but which are intercepted by the antennae of insects. What connection between our sensations and their cause? Without a sensitive receiver, nature remains mute, colorless and odorless. It is within us that number becomes harmony.
The wonder is that man has been able to fabricate instruments capable of supplying the insufficiency of his senses, of picking up imperceptible waves and unheard vibrations. We were already satisfied with our senses; the rest is superfluous. But whether we wish it or not, the rest is there. Man has daringly widened his reception and unlimited his power. Too bad he does not show himself more equal to it! He bears himself ill. Lack of habit, perhaps (let us hope so); all of that is so new! He is trespassing and he is overwhelmed.
When I learned that little knots of ribbon were called rosettes (how old could I have been? Five or six …) I got a quantity of both of them from my mother’s workbox, then, having locked myself in my room, away from looks that would have disturbed the miracle, I arranged a flower-bed, a whole garden, on the floor. Were they not flowers? The word meant that. It was only necessary to believe. And I tried for a good quarter of an hour. Nothing happened.
On a childish plane, that was the defeat of nominalism. And perhaps, after all, I lacked imagination. But I especially remember saying to myself: “What an idiot I am. What does all this foolishness mean? There is nothing there but pieces of ribbon, nothing at all …” and I went and put them back in my mother’s basket.
These are such hard times, that we can not imagine (or rather: are not willing to admit) that there could have been just as tragic ones at any other moment in history. Better informed, we should arrive, perhaps, at convincing ourselves that the exceptional was, very much to the contrary, the long period of tolerance in which we were living before the breaking out of horrors (which feel themselves decidedly at home—on earth)—so natural did that freedom of mind, so deplorably compromised today, appear to us. Here comes back a time when those will be considered traitors who do not think “properly.”
Some, it is true, still resist; and it is they alone who count. It is of little importance that they are few in number: it is in them that the idea of God takes refuge.
But the temptation which, for the young, is the most difficult to resist, is that of “enlisting,” as is said. Everything tempts one to it, the most skillful sophisms, motives the most noble in appearance and the most urgent. Much would have been accomplished if youth were persuaded that, at heart, it is through laisser-aller and laziness that they enlist;
… if youth were persuaded that it is a question—not of being this or that but—of being.
One flatters oneself, or at least one has the tendency to flatter oneself. Complacency toward oneself is a trap into which I have such great fear of falling that I have often been able to doubt the sincerity (the genuineness) of movements, that were, nevertheless, natural to me, as soon as they took the direction that I would have liked them to take. (My sentence is frightfully complicated; impossible to express that simply.) Those movements, those “states of mind,” I still had to recognize and admit as natural, when I found them exactly the same, in my daughter while still a child; in particular, a certain fundamental optimism, that, in myself, I could be afraid was obtained.
As someone asked Catherine, a little stupidly, it seems to me: “Where would you rather be? At Saint-Clair (where she was then) or in Paris?”—at first she seemed very much astonished; she could scarcely comprehend that such a question deserved asking; then ended by answering ingenuously:—“why, at Saint-Clair, since I am there.” (She must have been hardly more than five years old at that time.) And I suddenly recognized in her the very depths of my own nature and the secret of my happiness: an “Amen” indicated by the great difficulty, if not the impossibility (in that child as in myself) of producing and nourishing regrets.
To take things as they are.
Play with the cards one has.
Require one to be what one is.
Which does not keep me from fighting against all lies, falsifications etc. brought about by man and imposed on natural things against which it is vain to revolt. There is the inevitable and the modifiable. The acceptance of the modifiable is by no means included in the Amor Fati.
Which does not prevent one either from requiring the best from oneself, after one has recognized it as such. For one does not make a better likeness of oneself by giving way to the less good.
P.S. When I brought out these pages to-day, it seemed to me that I was wrong to tear up the first ones in this notebook. As bad as they were (I had just gotten up after an illness) they answered in advance remarks made to me by a friend, in whose wisdom I have great confidence; he never speaks for the purpose of saying nothing and says only sensible things. He protests that these pages, which I have just given him to read, are much less subversive than I seemed at first to think; even that a great number of eminent representatives of the Church would willingly subscribe to them to-day; and he quotes some names that I take care not to repeat. X. and Y. were already speaking to me in the same manner, affirming that I was not very cognizant of the present state of the Church, the intelligent pliancy of its Credo. I admitted I was not at all “up to date” and that, for greater convenience doubtless, I kept to what Bossuet taught me; that as soon as it was a question of Variations, it could only be the Protestant Churches (according to the title itself of his admirable work) to which the Catholic Church was opposed, by “its character of immutability in the faith.”
“Without doubt,” he responded, “but nevertheless it evolves ceaselessly. You would like to harden it, to make of it a finished product; it is living and answers the new requirements. Remember Chesterton’s beautiful pages, translated by Claudel, that you made me read in the N. R. F. some time ago? ‘The Church,’ he said, ‘is never static’.” And he compared it to a cart running at full speed over a narrow ridge avoiding new perils to right and left ceaselessly. “There is not a doubt,” continues my friend, “that enlightened Catholics would not be troubled at all by the affirmations you have just stated. It is your right to call Virtue what they call God; a mere question of words; it is the same thing. The idea of God, the need for God torments you; they ask nothing more of you in order to recognize you as one of theirs. And as I nevertheless protest that there is a misunderstanding; that I am searching for what makes them reject me just the same, I return to those opening pages, written in this notebook, those badly done pages, torn up; they treated of eternal life; a sort of premonitory instinct tempted me to put them at the beginning; to speak of that first, and now I understand that it was, indeed, necessary to begin with that.
That the life of the “soul” prolongs itself beyond the dissolution of the flesh, for me, is inadmissible and unthinkable, and something against which my reason protests; as well as against the incessant expanding of souls.
1 See in fine.
1 This is the first time I use that terrible word, the only one that fits.