Complete health is a benefit that no one would ever think of refusing, but if nature has inscribed in its formidable book certain troubles for your organism, it is necessary not to be overly afflicted by that, but to seek to obtain an advantage therefrom for the knowledge of invisible worlds.
There are in illness points of contact with those words that one cannot have in a state of health. The dreams of fever are not incoherent inventions but deformed images of the reality that is beyond our senses. It is sometimes by virtue of fever that an indication is given to the mind, because it is the state of disturbance that permits its reception. How many apparitions have been perceived, how many admirable words heard, of which one did not take account because they were perceived in a fever?
For those who attach an inestimable value to the certainty of the afterlife, illness merits rehabilitation.
THE APPARITION OF THE LAMP
Perhaps personal experience ought to remain secret and there are things that ought not to be revealed. Perhaps there is a mystery that one abolishes by describing it. But is not silence the equivalent of annihilation, and is not the duty of speech as imperious as the duty of silence?
The example I can give is very minimal. I am not giving it to serve as an example to someone who wants to follow the same research as me. I am obeying an internal invitation to recount.
That evening I had not sensed the courage to make any appeal, any invocation to powers living or dead. The apartment was deserted, I sensed that the street was deserted behind the walls, and my soul was deserted, like the immense world in which I sensed that I was lost.
I do not know why a terrible word came back to my memory and appeared to me as if it were written in letters of fire in an invisible book:
There are men for whom life is a torture...
Certainly, I was not one of those men. Life had never been a torture for me, and I had even extracted numerous, varied and delectable joys from it. The source of those joys had dried up, that was all. Or rather, it had been replaced by another, more abundant and purer source devoid of all bitterness but from which I drew in solitude. No, I had no grounds for complaint, and, face to face with the past, I owed it an action of grace.
“Praise be to life and its multiform beauty, to the pleasure of human love, to the richness of thoughts that one finds in books, to everything that is charming and perishable!” I formulated with my lips. But in the depths of myself was written: There are men for whom life is a torture...
I had known some of them. They had lived and they had died. I saw them again. Their characteristic was an apparent enthusiasm for life: a desperate enthusiasm; an enthusiasm that went as far as desiring death in the hope of a higher life. I had lived intimately with two or three of them, but there were others that I had only glimpsed, in gatherings or in cafés, especially in cafés. I remembered the shining eyes, the particles of genius scattered in speeches at marble tables, sometimes flashes of hatred. And they had left neither works, nor sketches of works. Their actions had only been essays and usually stillborn essays. They had been useless to their fellows, perhaps harmful. And I cherished them without any valid reason, perhaps solely because life had been a torture for them.
I listened for a long time to the sounds of the city and the night, to know whether anything particularly extraordinary was happening: the fall of the Eiffel Tower, or the seven blasts of the trumpet of the Apocalypse, the signal for the end of time. I assured myself with a secret regret that there was nothing but the moan of taxis moving through the endless sadness of the streets, and, here and there, a lamentable gramophone tune hanging on to a window like a poisoned bird. Then I thought that when there is no end of the world in prospect, and one cannot rid one’s mind of those for whom life is a torture, there remains an ultimate, profound refuge full of forgiveness and forgetfulness, and that refuge is slumber.
Toward that refuge, which has always been accorded to me a little before midnight, I precipitated myself with ardor. That ardor was a flight. I fled what was around me, the books and the benevolent photographs; I fled the people of memory, always ready to appear at the slightest sign; I fled my own thoughts, my own insignificant life; above all, I fled those for whom life is a torture, whose faces I saw again, dolorous and grave, their cheeks marked by alcoholism and a certain laughter more atrocious than any sorrow.
And I wondered whether, of those companions that I had known and who had disappeared, I was not the survivor. Was I not a member of that desperate family, who had resisted life because he had been more favored by fate, who had been able to create chimeras, depict them, whisper them in the form of idols and worship them, in order to have a reason for living? But sometimes the balloon of ideas burst; there was no longer anything there, and I found myself similar to my brothers the alcoholics, the desperate, those for whom life was a torture.
Oh, to pass quickly under the portico of sleep! To enter into the world of nocturnal things, perhaps dreams, almost certainly silence and repose.
And for that, in order to forget everything, it was only necessary to flick the switch of an electric lamp, stretch out the arms in a cross, as if dead, and wait.
In reality, that is not what I do every evening. When the light is switched off, I take advantage of the peace of darkness to collect myself, to attempt to communicate, by the surge of thought, with the superior forces of the spirit, which I imagine as personal entities susceptible of hearing me. And sometimes it happens that I have, if not a response to my request, at least a little sign permitting me to believe that my aspiration was known, and that my silent words were not lost.
But that evening, the virtue of request was not in me. My soul was like a stone, like a sealed tomb. I only sensed a profound and sincere desire for oblivion.
And it was then that the beyond manifested itself to me for the first time.
What creature of the beyond, what supremely attentive intelligence gave me, in exchange for despair, the gift of living light?
The obscurity of my bedroom was compact and I was lying motionless with my eyes open. In front of me and a little to the right, with a gripping rapidity, a light sprang forth, of a bright, pure and dazzling gold. And in the middle of that light, with the color and relief of life, was a lamp: a lamp of an obsolete model, a lamp of old, with an ordinary tapering foot and a beak for turning the wick.
Now, I recognized that lamp perfectly. It was the lamp of which I had made use in my youth, which had cast its mediocre but faithful light in my student room. To that lamp, once, I had given the form of amity that one gives to certain familiar objects when the number of possessions is restricted and the objects render you the precious services that matter renders to mind. When more modern rooms had permitted me electric lighting, I had kept the lamp as a souvenir of certain evenings of cold, solitude and hope, with which it was linked and of which it had been the soul. Then the years had passed, changes of residence had succeeded one another and the lamp had disappeared. There had never been a precise moment of disappearance. I had regretted that loss. But I could not believe that it been thrown in the rubbish. It had dematerialized and, by virtue of a mysterious ascension, had returned to the abode of eternal flames.
Now, it had descended again. Not for long—I estimate at five seconds the time for which it was presented to my eyes; but that time appeared infinitely long to me. It was long enough for me to be conscious that an event of a marvelous order had occurred, and that the event in question was produced by a golden glow, and that the lamp of my youth was at the heart of that glow.
And immediately, the lamp disappeared and was replaced by the image of a Buddha, a standing Buddha placed in such a fashion that the light that had surrounded the lamp aureoled it in a perfectly harmonious fashion and resembled the painted gold leaf that is placed around certain statues of Buddha in order to represent the luminous aura that envelops them.
The Buddha did not remain before my eyes any longer than the consciousness I experienced of the reality o
f its image. It reentered into the fluid gold that surrounded it and that gold itself was attenuated, dissolved, and disappeared, giving way to the normal darkness that, logically, must not have ceased to fill the room.
An impression of rapture remained within me. The word rapture is the only one that I can employ in order to designate a state very different from the intellectual delight that I might have obtained from the satisfaction of having been the witness of an extraordinary manifestation violating the rules of nature and indubitably external to me. That impression of rapture must have overlapped slumber and I rediscovered it the next day when I awoke—after which it was effaced, as beauty is effaced when it is expressed, and amour when it has cast its breath of enchantment.
Whence came that messenger apparition that preserved me from the fall? From the unconscious, to which people now confides the role of explaining everything: the unconscious, parent of dreams, creator of better and worse? A testimony coming from the utmost depths of myself, and in consequence from my unconscious, imperiously asserts the negation.
Are there, as I believe, hierarchies of beings superior to humans, and do those beings, in certain cases, and for reasons that escape us, intervene?
Or is it necessary to believe that I received the message of a living being—a very powerful living being who could send his thought over a great distance? Once, I had the favor of approaching one of the men who have arrived at the highest degree of spiritualization, the only man who, to my knowledge, has attained the spiritual plane, manipulating forces at will and able to distribute them. Had I not remained, unknown to myself, in rapport with him? Space would not have been an obstacle to the transmission of his thought, and more than it is for a modern apparatus for transmitting radio waves. Had he not made use of his power to preserve me from a danger?
It was to that hypothesis that I rallied. For the greatest danger of all is perhaps despair, and the aspiration of the soul toward annihilation. Certainly, the days succeed one another, each bringing its particular tonality, its color of good fortune or misfortune. I would probably have found better thoughts the next day. But it is possible that, in the general economy of the spiritual life, the plunge into slumber with a surge of despair has a great importance, and that a superior and protective intelligence thought it good to preserve me from it.
Whatever its origin might have been, I understood the language of the symbol. It said:
The lamp of your youth is still burning. Here it is, still close to you. Once, unknown to yourself, you made a pact with the light; remain faithful to that pact. Here, to remind you, is the image of the man who, on the earth, has approached the truth most closely.
It was only the next day, I confess, that I saw again, but more veiled and more distant in my memory, the faces of men for whom life is a torture.
It was only then that I realized how favored I was among all those who are inscribed for torment. For those vanished brothers there had been no sign, no consolatory apparition. They had not even had within them the faith in such signs. They had been reabsorbed by the great destructive force without the slightest indication of the divine. They had departed without a lamp.
Where were they now? Through what avatars of transformations had they passed? And at what moment of time would they finally be given the sweet rapture that the golden light procures?
THE EVENING OF JUDGMENT
I had appealed and they had come, one by one, all my past bad deeds, for there cannot be for a man the serenity of the evening if he has not summoned them to appear before him and has not absolved himself of them.
For a long time they had remained in the background of my soul, but I knew that there had to be a day of final judgment for them and that I had to be the judge.
But in all those bad deeds I only heard the ordinary evil caused to other creatures. For me that evil had been like a ball that I had sent back with an automatic movement, after having received it in the intoxication of the game. Of good and evil, I had only been a bit-part player charged with receiving and launching. Those bad deeds did not have to be judged. If they were to have consequences, they would be as insignificant as their own substance.
It was a matter of a more subtle evil, and bad deeds that had touched the profound domain of the soul.
One day, when I was walking in the summer sunlight through the countryside near the Mediterranean coast I had perceived a black cat in front of a very poor solitary house. It was a kitten, particularly thin, threadbare and melancholy. It seemed imprinted with the desolation that only beings deprived of all affection have. There must also have been a drama of nourishment there. The cat did not reflect the joy in living that young animals have. It seemed to possess a precocious consciousness of its solitude and the evil fate that had caused it to fall into the hands of harsh and indifferent masters.
I stopped and I took it in my arms in spite of its protestations and its fear, and I stroked it gently with my hand. The protestations ceased and the cat seemed suddenly to abandon itself. It raised its head toward me and I saw in its round bright eyes something akin to a distracted stupor. At the same time it emitted a bizarre murmur that was not the purr of satisfied cats, but expressed the bliss of an admirable novelty.
I put it back in the place from which I had had taken it and I continued my route. It was a little road that snaked between pines. After a minute, on turning round, I saw that the cat was walking behind me, with an unsteady gait. I made a gesture to order it to stay and hastened my step. But the cat had made a rapid decision. It had abandoned its birthplace and it was giving itself to me.
In vain I gave it a further order to go back. It strove to run. I wondered what I ought to do. Could I steal it from its masters, whom I did not know and who must be bad masters? But it was not that scruple that retained me. I imagined the embarrassment that a cat would cause me in the hotel where I was staying, the sight that I would present in traversing the hall of the hotel carrying that pitiful creature, and my ignorance of the care that needed to be given to a sick cat.
I started to run along the road. Then I heard a desperate voice behind me, without analogy with any animal voice, and I saw that black, bristling, caricature of a being, trying with all its might to catch up with me. I had the cowardice of increasing my speed, and it was only after a long distance, and when the road had turned several times, that I ceased to hear the appeal of the creature to which I had revealed what love is.
In the darkness of its absolute misery, it had not known that there was anything else in the world than the fear of the strong, hunger and solitude. And I had made it know goodness and had immediately snatched away what I had just given it.
And that bad deed I had accomplished—exactly the same one—with human creatures. Was that, then, a greater evil deed? Is there a hierarchy in the scale of the evil that one does, according to the degree of development of the beings to which one does it? I am not sure about that.
It was in the time of my youth in Toulouse, when I still distinguished poorly the differences established by the social order. One day, I passed a young woman in the street who seemed charming to me. Perhaps she was. I followed her, I returned to the vicinity of her house and I perceived that she had the custom of looking out of a ground-floor window. I did not make any connection between the particular quarter where the house was situated and the presence of the charming young woman at a window from which communications with passers-by are quickly established. It was summer, in any case, and it was normal to be sitting behind open Venetian blinds. I went back to the street frequently and, as a first move, I sent a bouquet of flowers, via the intermediary of a child, to the young woman that I dared not approach directly.
It is not customary in our day to send flowers to a professional hooker. That gift was so abnormal that it produced an immense effect, for the bouquet arrived at dusk, at the hour when everyone in standing in doorways and in the frames of windows.
A strange amity resulted from it, in which my timidity was abl
e to retain the character of amity.
“Since you read a lot,” the young woman at the window said to me once—for she had seen me with books under my arm—“lend me a book. I’ll read it, even if there are verses.”
Now, at that time, I had just bought—and it had been a serious material effort for me—the latest book by Henri de Régnier, entitled Episodes, sites et sonnets.28 It was, so far as I remember, of a rather mysterious symbolism. I feared that it might be incomprehensible. On the contrary, it was read and reread, learned by heart. It became a sort of Bible of an incomprehensible cult, perhaps that of the elevation of the soul: a cult that is celebrated at every degree of the human scale.
I do not know what happened in me. It was not because I discovered what modest career my friend had been called to follow. It was only later, with a little more experience, that I understood that. Something happened within me that might be called a sudden indifference, a taste for change, or to which one can give any name one wishes. I interrupted the intellectual rapport that I had maintained faithfully and which had taken on a sentimental coloration of its own accord. I abandoned the volume of Henri de Régnier and the person who had made a breviary of it. I did not go back to the room where my desiccated bouquet had been conserved as the testimony of I know not what ideal, which is forever forbidden to certain creatures. That inexplicable thing I had enabled her to glimpse; I had brought it, and my absence annihilated it.
It took years for me to realize that my departure, which must have been interpreted as a kind of scorn, was a cruelty colder than any insult. From the person who had believed that the best thing in the world, amity, could exist, I have taken away that faith. I had permitted her to rise by a degree in the scale of emotions and I had allowed her to slip back by abandoning her. Was that not the sin against the spirit, the only one that is unforgivable?
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