Solitude
It was just after a male dinner-party. The evening had been hilarious. One of the guests, an old friend of mine, said to me:
“Would you like to walk up the Avenue des Champ-Élysése?”
So we set off, walking slowly up the long sidewalk, under trees that showed their first sparse leaves. There was no sound but the confused ceaseless murmuring of Paris. A fresh wind blew across our faces, and the dark sky was sown with a golden dust by the myriad stars.
My companion said to me:
“I don’t know why, but I breathe better here at night than anywhere else in the world. At these times my spirit seems freed. For a moment, I have one of those sudden inward gleams of light that for a fraction of time deceive us with the thought that we have penetrated the divine secret of the universe. Then the window closes again. The moment is gone.”
From time to time we see two shadows slipping along under the walls; we walk past a bench where, pressed close together, two human beings are merged into one dark blur.
The man at my side murmured:
“Poor wretches! They rouse in me no disgust, but only a profound pity. Of all the mysteries of human life, I have pierced one: the terrible unhappiness of mortal life has its roots in the lifelong loneliness of every one of us: all our strivings, all our acts have one end only, escape from this loneliness. Those poor creatures, making love on public benches in the open air, are trying, as we try, as all mortal wretches try, to end their isolation, if only for a moment or less; but they remain, they will always remain solitary, and so shall we also.
“Some days we realise it more sharply, some less, that’s all.
“For some time now I have been suffering the unspeakable torment born of my realisation, my vision of the frightful solitude in which I spend my life, and I know that nothing can end it, nothing, I tell you. Whatever our strivings, whatever our deeds, whatever the wild desire of our hearts, the demands of our lips and the clutch of our arms, we are always solitary.
“I persuaded you to walk along here with me this evening because I suffer horribly, these days, from the loneliness of my apartment. What good will this do me? I talk to you, you listen to me, and we are alone together, side by side, but alone. Do you understand?
“Blessed are the poor in heart, says the Scripture. They keep the illusion of happiness. Such as they do not endure a solitary bitterness, they do not, as I do, drift through life and never touch it but to jostle elbows with it, with no joy but a self-centred satisfaction in understanding, observing, guessing, and enduring without end the knowledge of our eternal isolation.
“You think me a little mad, don’t you?
“Listen to me. Since I have been conscious of the solitude of my spirit, I have felt that day by day I penetrate a little further into a subterranean darkness, whose bounds I cannot find, whose end I do not know, which perhaps has no end. I go my way through it without any companion, without anyone near me, and no living soul is walking along the same shadowy road. This subterranean passage is life. Sometimes I hear sounds, voices, cries. … I grope towards these confused murmurs. But I never know exactly whence they come; I never meet any other person, I never touch another hand in the darkness that surrounds me. Do you understand?
“At times men have caught a glimpse of this frightful anguish.
“Musset wrote:
“Qui vient? Qui m’appelle? Personne.
Je suis seul.—C’est l’heure qui sonne.
O solitude!—O pauvreté!16
“But, for him, it was only a fleeting uneasiness, and not, as for me, a hard certainty. He was a poet; he peopled life with phantoms and dreams. He was never truly alone. I, I am alone!
“Did not Gustave Flaubert, one of the great seers and therefore one of the great tragic figures of this world, write to a friend these despairing words?—‘We are all of us in a wilderness. No man understands any other.’
“No, no man understands any other, whatever he thinks, whatever he says, whatever he tries to do. Does the earth know what is happening in those stars we see, flung out in space like a seed of fire, so distant that we see the light only of a few while the innumerable company of the others is lost in infinity, so near that they are perhaps one whole like the molecules of a body?
“Even so, man has no more knowledge of what is taking place in another man. We are farther from each other than these stars, and even more isolated, since thought is an impassable barrier.
“Do you know anything more dreadful than the swift and endless passing by of human beings whose minds we cannot reach? We love each other as if we were chained fast, close together, with outstretched arms that just cannot touch. We are torn with a desire for union, but all our efforts are barren, our moments of passionate abandon futile, our caresses vain. We reach out towards an intimate union, we strain towards each other, and achieve no more than the violent impact of our bodies.
“I never feel more solitary than when I open my heart to a friend, because it is then that I realise most sharply the impassable barrier. He is beside me, this man; I see his clear eyes fixed on me, but of his soul, behind them, I know nothing at all. He listens to me. What is he thinking? You don’t understand this agony of mind? Perhaps he hates me? or despises me? or is jeering at me? He thinks over what I am saying, he judges me, he rails at me, he condemns me, considers me commonplace or a fool. How do I know what he is thinking? How do I know whether he loves me as I love him? And what is passing through that small round head? What a mysterious thing are the secret thoughts of a human being, these thoughts that are at once hidden and free, that we can neither know, nor direct, nor rule, nor vanquish.
“And I, even I, who have all the will in the world to give my whole being, to fling open all the doors of my soul, cannot surrender myself. In the deepest recesses of my being, I guard the secret hiding-place of this I where no man can enter in. No man can discover it, nor enter therein, because no other man is made in my likeness, because no man understands any other.
“Even now, as I speak, do you at least understand me? No, you think me mad! You watch me curiously, you guard yourself from me! You say to yourself: ‘What is the matter with him this evening?’ but if ever there comes to you a moment of insight, and you feel in all its horror the subtle and unbearable suffering I endure, come to me and say only, ‘I understand you,’ and you will give me perhaps one second of happiness.
“There are women who make me realise my solitude even more vividly.
“Wretched! Most wretched! How I have suffered through them, because more often than men do, they have deluded me into thinking that I do not live alone.
“When we enter the dominion of Love we feel a sudden sense of freedom. An unearthly happiness pervades us. Do you know why? Do you know whence comes this sense of profound well-being? It is born of nothing more than a dream that we are no longer solitary. The isolation, the forsaken loneliness of the human spirit seems ended. What folly!
“Even more cruelly driven are we by the undying craving for love which gnaws at our lonely hearts; woman is the dream’s supremest cheat.
“You know those glorious hours spent in the company of this long-haired creature whose form enchants us and whose glance inflames us. What ecstasy it is that confounds our minds! What false dream that sweeps us away!
“Can it be that any moment now she and I will be one, one whole? But this ‘any moment now’ never comes, and after weeks of waiting, of hope and deceitful joy, one day I find myself suddenly more alone than I have ever been before.
“After each kiss, after each embrace, the isolation grows. And how overwhelming, how monstrous it is!
“Sully-Prudhomme, the poet, wrote:
“Les caresses ne sont que d’inquiets transports,
Infructueux essais du pauvre amour qui tente
L’impossible union des âmes par les corps. …17
And then, goodbye. It is the end. You hardly recognise this woman who for an instant of time has been everything to you, and whose inmost—and probably quite commonplace—soul has remained a mystery to you.
“In the very hours when it seemed that, in a mysterious harmony of spirit, a perfect mingling of your desires and all your longings, you had reached down to the very depths of her soul, a word, sometimes only one word, reveals your error and, like a bright light in darkness, shows you the black pit opened between you.
“Nevertheless, the dearest thing in the world still is to spend an evening in the presence of a beloved woman, without words, almost entirely content in the mere sense of her nearness. Ask for nothing more, for never will your soul meet another’s.
“As for me, I have shut up the gates of my spirit. I no longer talk to anyone of what I believe, what I think, and what I love. Knowing myself condemned to a frightful solitude, I look out on life as a spectator, and make no comments. Of what account are opinions, quarrels, pleasures, beliefs? Unable to share my life with any other creature, I stand apart from all. My spirit, unseen, keeps its undiscovered house. I have conventional phrases with which to reply to the day’s questions, and a smile that signifies ‘Yes’ when I do not want even to take the trouble to speak.
“Do you understand?”
We had walked up the long avenue as far as the Arc de Triomphe at the Étoile end, and now come back to the Place de la Concorde, for he had delivered himself of all this without haste and added to it a great deal more that now I do not remember.
He halted; and flinging out his arm in an abrupt gesture towards the tall granite obelisk that rears itself from the stones of Paris and loses its lofty Egyptian profile in the stars, an exiled monument bearing the history of its country written in strange signs on its flank, my friend cried: “Look, we are all as that stone!” and left me on the instant without another word.
Was he drunk? Was he mad? Was he inspired? Even now I do not know. Sometimes I think that he was right; sometimes I think that he had lost his mind.