Letter from a Madman
My dear doctor: I am putting myself in your hands. Do with me as you please.
I am going to tell you very frankly my strange state of mind, and you will decide whether it might not be better to have me cared for, during a certain time, in a sanitarium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that harass me.
This is the story, long and exact, of the strange sickness of my soul.
I used to live like everyone else, looking at life with man’s open, blind eyes, without wonder and without understanding. I lived as animals live, as we all live, fulfilling all the functions of existence, looking and thinking that I saw, thinking that I knew and understood what surrounded me; when one day I realized that all is false.
It was a phrase of Montesquieu’s that suddenly illuminated my mind. Here it is: “One organ more or less in our mechanism would have caused us to have a different intelligence. … In short, all laws established on the basis of our mechanism being of a certain kind would be different if our mechanism were not of this kind.”
I reflected on that for months, for months and months, and little by little I was permeated by a strange clarity, and this clarity has brought on darkness.
Actually, our organs are the only intermediaries between the external world and ourselves. That is to say, our internal existence, what constitutes the I, makes contact by means of certain networks of nerves, with the external existence that constitutes the world.
Now, not to mention the fact that we fail to comprehend this external existence because of its proportions, its duration, its innumerable and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its ends, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs supply us, concerning that portion of it which we are able to understand at all, with information as uncertain as it is sparse.
Uncertain, because it is solely the properties of our organs which determine for us the apparent properties of matter.
Sparse, because since our senses are but five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are very restricted.
Let me explain. The eye acquaints us with dimensions, forms, and colors. It deceives us on these three points.
It can reveal to us only objects and beings of medium dimensions, in proportion to human size—thus causing us to apply the word large to certain things and the word small to certain others, solely because its weakness does not permit it to comprehend what is too vast or too minute for it. As a result, it knows and sees almost nothing; almost the entire universe remains hidden from it—the star in space and the animalcule in a drop of water.
Even if it had a hundred million times its normal power, if it perceived in the air we breathe all the races of invisible beings, as well as the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist infinite numbers of races of yet smaller beings, and worlds so very distant that it could not reach them.
Thus all our ideas of proportion are false, since there is no possible limit of largeness or smallness.
Our estimation of dimensions and forms has no absolute value, being determined solely by the power of one organ and by constant comparison with ourselves.
Furthermore, the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. It is deceived by a flawless sheet of glass. It confuses it with the air, which it also does not see.
Let us go on to color.
Color exists because our eye is so constituted that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways in which bodies absorb and decompose, according to their chemical composition, the light rays which strike them.
The varying degrees of this absorption and decomposition constitute shades and tints.
Thus this organ imposes on the mind its manner of seeing, or rather its arbitrary manner of recording dimensions and estimating the relations between light and matter.
Let us examine hearing.
Even to a greater extent than with the eye, we are the dupes and playthings of this whimsical organ.
Two colliding bodies produce a certain disturbance of the atmosphere. This movement causes to vibrate in our ear a certain small membrane which immediately changes into sound what is really only vibration.
Nature is mute. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us in the form of a sense, a sense that differs according to the number of vibrations, all the quiverings of the invisible waves in space.
This metamorphosis accomplished by the auditory nerve in the short journey from ear to brain has enabled us to create a strange art, music, the most poetic and the most precise of the arts, vague as a dream and exact as algebra.
What shall we say of taste and smell? Would we know the flavors and the quality of foods if it were not for the bizarre properties of our nose and our palate?
Humanity could, however, exist without hearing, without taste, and without smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or odor.
Thus, if we had several fewer organs, we would be ignorant of things that are admirable and strange, but if we had several additional organs, we should discover about us an infinity of other things that we should never suspect due to lack of means of ascertaining them.
Thus, we are deceived when we judge what we know, and we are surrounded by unexplored things that we do not know.
Thus, everything is uncertain and capable of being estimated in different ways.
Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
Let us formulate that certainty by making use of the old dictum: “What is true on one side of the Pyrenees is false on the other.”
And let us say: “What is true within the field of our organism is false outside it.”
Two and two do not necessarily make four outside our atmosphere.
What is true on earth is false beyond, whence I conclude that such imperfectly perceived mysteries as electricity, hypnotic sleep, thought transference, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena, remain hidden from us only because nature has not furnished us with the organ or organs necessary for their understanding.
After having convinced myself that everything revealed to me by my senses exists, as I perceive it, only for me, and would be totally different for another being otherwise constituted, after having concluded that a humanity differently made would have, concerning the world, concerning life, concerning everything, ideas absolutely opposed to ours, because agreement of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and divergences of opinion only from the slight differences in the functioning of our nervous systems, I made a superhuman effort of thought to infer the impenetrable that surrounds me.
Have I gone mad?
I told myself: I am enclosed in things unknown. I thought of a man without ears inferring sound, as we infer so many hidden mysteries, a man establishing the existence of acoustical phenomena of which he could determine neither the nature nor the source. And I became afraid of everything around me, afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment all is limitless, what remains? The void—is it not so? What is there in that apparent void?
And that confused terror of the supernatural that has haunted mankind since the birth of the world is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing but that which remains veiled from us!
Then I understood dread. It seemed to me that I was on the verge of discovering a secret of the universe.
I tried to sharpen my organs, to excite them, to make them momentarily perceive the invisible.
I told myself: Everything is a being. The cry that passes through the air is a being comparable to an animal, since it is born, moves, transforms itself and dies. Thus the fearful mind that believes in non-corporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
How many men have a presentiment of them, shudder at their approach, tremble at their barely perceptible contact! We feel them near us, all about us, but we cannot distinguish them, for we haven’t the eye that could see them, or rather the unknown organ that could detect them.
Then, more than anyone else, I felt them, these supernatural passersby. Beings or mysteries? I do not know. I could not say what they were, but I could always distinguish their presence. And I have seen—seen—an invisible being, as much as one can see such a thing.
I passed entire nights sitting motionless at my table, my head in my hands, thinking of them. Often I believed than an intangible, or rather an imperceptible body, was hovering over my hair. It did not touch me, not being of fleshy essence, but of an essence that was imponderable, unknowable.
Then, one night, I heard my floor creak behind me. It creaked in a strange way. I shuddered. I turned. I saw nothing. And I thought no more of it.
But the next night, at the same hour, I heard the same sound. I was so frightened that I stood up, sure, sure, sure that I was not alone in my room. Nothing, however, was to be seen. The air was limpid, transparent everywhere. My two lamps made every corner bright.
The sound did not begin again, and I gradually became calmer; still, I remained uneasy, and often turned to look.
The next night I shut myself in my room early, wondering how I might succeed in seeing the Invisible that was visiting me.
And I saw It. I almost died of terror.
I had lit all the candles on my mantel and in my chandelier. The room was lighted as though for a party. My two lamps were burning on my table.
Opposite me, my bed, an old oak four-poster. To the right, my fireplace. To the left, my door, which I had locked. Behind me, a very large closet with mirrored doors. I looked at myself in the mirrors for a moment. My eyes were strange, the pupils very dilated.
Then I sat at my table as usual.
The sound had occurred, the preceding nights, at nine twenty-two. I waited. When the exact moment arrived, I was conscious of an indescribable sensation, as though a fluid, an irresistible fluid, had penetrated every part of my body, drowning my soul in a dread that was excruciating and rapturous. And the floor creaked, just behind me.
I jumped up, turning so fast that I almost fell. All was as clear as daylight, and I did not see myself in the mirror! It was empty, bright, full of light. I was not in it, and yet I was just opposite it. I stared, terrified. I dared not go near it, sensing full well that it was between us, it, the Invisible, and that it was concealing me from the glass.
Oh! How terrified I was! And then I began to see myself, as in a fog, in the depths of the mirror, as though through water; and it seemed to me that this water was sliding from left to right, slowly, making my image more precise from second to second. It was like the end of an eclipse. What was hiding me had no outlines, but a sort of opaque transparency, gradually becoming clearer.
And finally I was able to see myself perfectly, as I do every day when I look at myself.
So, I have seen it!
And I have never seen it again.
But I am waiting for it, and I feel that I am losing my mind as I wait.
I spend hours, nights, days, weeks, before my mirror, waiting! It does not come.
It knew that I had seen it. But I feel that I shall wait for it always, until death; that I shall wait without rest before that mirror, like a huntsman on the watch.
And in that mirror I am beginning to see mad images, monsters, hideous corpses, all sorts of frightful beasts, dreadful beings, all the unlikely visions that must haunt the minds of madmen.
That is my confession, Doctor. Tell me: what must I do?