Illusions of Immortality, page 10
Instead of the terror of dubious hope, however, the final aspect of terrestrial religion was certainty, anticipation and smiles. For what tortures the mind durably is doubt; certainty is only painful to begin with. It had been known for too long for the knowledge still to be painful.
Sibling to the grave fatalism that once proclaimed in the Orient; “It is written,” a good-humored and slightly ironic fatalism murmured complacently: “It is formulated”—and the world lived on under the menace of the Moon, nonchalantly and effortlessly, like a great harem under the promises of the Sun. Since no one could escape the inexorable law, no one thought of praying to it; consequently, it had nothing to refuse, and because of that, no longer seemed inexorable; it was, therefore, a god without rigor, one that had neither rites not symbols, about which one talked without eloquence, like the weather: a simple god, of which one could make fun without risking any punishment or offending its religion, since laughing at it was laughing at oneself and one’s own death.
It was featured in ditties, and that bravado flattered vanity. It accepted everything and on fine nights, also smiled. It is inevitable that gods resemble their peoples; otherwise, they would not be gods.
But it continued, even so—like its predecessors—to be the administrator of justice who makes a mockery of suffering, for the starveling crushed in the street by a carriage-wheel could shout at the rich passenger: “You’ll be disemboweled like everyone else!”
A lexicon of new proverbs came into being. The common people adopted mocking locutions and dicta. One said by way of welcome: “You’re falling like the Moon in April.” When one encountered a funeral cortege, one greeted it with: “There’s another who won’t see the end of the world.” At interments, people talked about the impending inlunement.18 Everyone repeated the remarks on the theme they deemed to be the cleverest; a few invented new jokes.
It was a matter of good taste to be witty about the matter, and above all to manifest no dread. Those people who, enjoying a placid temperament and being uninterested in everything, would have preferred to die peacefully in their beds at an unknown date, only admitted it at the end of a meal, with a hearty laugh, as if it were a joke, to hide their cowardice beneath their gaiety. But the pusillanimous were few in number, and anyone who expressed such a bizarre desire without laughing was immediately deemed to be an eccentric.
In the same way, old people hid their desire to live longer behind a desire to see the marvel—which, however, at their brutish age, scarcely tempted them any longer—and said while caressing their grandchildren’s hair: “You’ll see the end of the world.”
With that hope so strongly accredited, those whose days had not been fortunate and to whom existence promised little lived as best they could, being patient and not seeking death voluntarily.
What do people need in order to support their tribulations? To have a goal! Humankind had but one goal: to see!
All weariness was comforted. People waited. The human race was like a crowd in a railway station hoping for the whistle of the departing train. To some, the interval seemed long, and they would gladly have advanced the hands of the clock to hasten the departure, but no one wanted to leave alone, and suicides were rare. They wanted to see! No one any longer killed themselves because their business had failed or because they had undertaken some shameful enterprise. Only occasional insensate individuals, racked by amorous chagrin, cried out in the solitude: “I don’t give a damn about the moon!” Then they killed themselves abruptly, without reflection.
They were mourned with slight disdain; they were imbeciles for not having understood the sublime spectacle that was offered to them, and impolite toward the universe that had brought them to it.
“Since one is certain to die then, what’s the point of killing oneself?”
One might have thought that their race was the first to possess the certainty of dying, because they were sure of dying on a fixed date.
Is it not an analogous sensation that permits us to talk about people condemned to death as if not all people were? The truth is that they are condemned at a precise date, and as long as the idea of death is not combined with the knowledge of the moment of its occurrence, we only half-comprehend the necessity of dying. The instinct of self-preservation forbids us to have a clear and precise notion of our end, so long as we cannot yet specify it, and that instinct, in giving us the desire to escape death even after death, has driven us to imagine the immortality of the soul.
In that age, however—alas!—science had put paid to that pretentious vanity a long time before; at the same stroke, all the attentive gods had vanished, and no one believed that the Eternal and the Absolute could possibly be interested in their interests or fantasies; no one was any longer unaware that general laws do not care about particular instances.
Henceforth, humans knew that they were no more than errant animals, kin to aphids: an infinitesimal force in the midst of a universe of forces.
Along with the flattering illusion of their importance, they had gradually lost the entire treasure of illusions that had flowed therefrom to enliven life. Reason had given them nothing in exchange for what it had taken away, for reason is not as benevolent as superior spirits, and average stupidity can only extract misery therefrom. The pasturage of the intelligent is the poison of the mediocre; truth nourishes the strong but, poorly digested by the weak, is nothing for them but a septic ferment that causes them to rot faster. The world does not take long to make errors of received verities! Since their pampering gods and their own immortality had been sent to the slaughterhouse, they had sent everything else the same way.
One thing having crumbled, everything crumbled; the edifice of conventions, customs and virtues is built in such a way that dislodging one stone disequilibrates all the rest. Error is the indispensable armor of minds; it is their breastplate, and that is what protects them; slicing through the errors, philosophy had stabbed the human soul. It did not even remember any longer having been led by aphorisms, illusions and superstitions; it almost required genius to comprehend the paradoxical book in which the history could be read of a species of people that had imagined Hell, Paradise and all the other myths.
The ideal was no more; only the real existed. No abstractions, things! Good, evil—what did those words signify? Humans had set down the burden of chimeras. They were tranquil, and lived in peace with the consciousness of their nonentity.
Thus widowed, the human soul had soon died, and one might have thought that, by way of revenge against the religions of old, the human animal would last longer than its soul.
Humans no longer affirmed anything, knowing that every affirmation is a lie. The Christian Era had decreed: “There is truth and falsehood,” the Rational Era: “Everything is true.” The people of the world’s end said: “Everything is false.”
They had learned from their ancestors the inanity of theories, the renewal of imbecility, the fluctuation of principles and nonsense; no idea merited more than any other that one might deign to proclaim it, and never again would a furious desire to prove something resuscitate enthusiasm. Ideas having become despicable, no one thought of dying, and more than they thought of living, for an idea. Who would have talked about serving a cause? Such naivety no longer raised its head. No one could pledge his faith, since faith no longer existed, and abnegation was henceforth a word devoid of meaning. Heroism had not retained the right to exist; because the principle of battling was dead, there were no more battles, and because there were no more battles, there was no more courage.
To sacrifice one’s life for a duty, is it not necessary that there should be something there to admired us, even if it is only ourselves? And when the cult of absolute and abstract things has been exiled from our consciousness, we shall not even find in ourselves the necessary admirer.
Thus, those who clung to a duty were no longer to be found. People were no longer mad; that was the madness of the time.
By way of compensation, however, phraseology had lost a part of its rights; it seemed that stupidity had diminished, since it was less exploited.
Only old Republicans still repeated a few formulae relative to honor, but no one listened to them, much less argued with them, and even though everyone knew that they talked that way habitually, no one even paid their phrases the attention that intellectual juggling might merit.
The certainty of the end had eliminated from politics the party bent on reform. Economists were out of work; politicians no longer promised the masses anything, since they had no benefit to obtain by their promises. No one said: “What’s new on the horizon?” anymore, because it as inevitably necessary to reply: “Nothing.”
With all the other residues of primitive and so-long-inviolable barbarism, fatherlands had disappeared, and wars, and armies, and logically, military men; the noise of sabers and peace-time bravado was no longer heard in the streets; no one lived or died for his fatherland or motherland.
Those were benefits; they were not the only ones. The absence of duties having abolished virtues, the absence of virtues abolished hypocrisies; lies lasted longer, admittedly, but people lied in order to repair things, from day to day, and only a little; as for noble lies, they had been retired, and no one any longer tested, for the needs of vain grandeur, the limits of nature. Nature invited, and the law did not prohibit; it dared not and could not. What would conservative laws still have had to protect? “The world ends with us!” The brief duration of the future no longer imposed restraint; and, social interests no longer having to be consolidated to the detriment of individual interests, legal codes were softening day by day.
For is laws are only the means of consolidating societies, the constitution of societies are no longer the real objective, but merely the means of improving individual existence.
On the day when a collectivity no longer has a future, its laws no longer have any force because they no longer have any reason for existence; the individual will then march upon them and reclaim his animal rights, one after another, until they are all recovered.
As at the beginning of the ages, there was nothing but the individual. However, as it was still necessary, until the end, even in the interest of individuals, to protect certain primordial elements, such as life and property, a few precise and expert texts were retained, which continued to regulate the immediate relations of one being with another; for want to moral rules, they delimited right and duty. Both were simple: right was called enjoyment; duty consisted in not allowing oneself to be caught in the execution of what it was indispensable to consider as a fraud—a fraud, not a crime. In committing one of them, one did not render oneself guilty, since the notions of good and evil no longer existed, but one rendered oneself dangerous, since the notions of mine and yours had not been abolished. Someone who was arrested for having wanted to augment his own enjoyment at the expense of the enjoyment of others, was not shamed as a criminal but mourned as an impotent individual, mocked as an unskillful one; he was subject to restrain without incurring shame.
In spite of the universal demoralization, the great crimes of yore diminished. Hatred, which is a passion as well as a killjoy, was suppressed under both headings. There were few murders. By the same token, in the absence of long-term interests, people hardly ever poisoned their relatives. That was loading one’s arms with awkward complications! For love of life, people even avoided stealing; theft might lead to imprisonment, that partial death, which was capable of becoming definitive, for prisons were more than ever comparable to cemeteries, since the condemned person entered a cell as if being buried alive in a tomb from which he would never emerge, and under whose debris he would be crushed.
Sometimes, however, bakers, butchers and grocers—and, in general, anyone who sold comestibles—were found in their shops with their throats cut or their skulls caved in. Some wretch, dying of hunger, had made the decision to steal a loaf of bread, and, in order not to die, to risk a penalty that would become death. So, when he saw that he was caught, he would kill the policeman, since the penalty would be no greater, just as, in order to avoid being pursued or recognized, he had killed the shopkeeper.
People did not like that; they avoided talking about it; such tales of misery were expelled from the joy, like excrement from a feast.
One day, however, the alarm was raised. Those who were not enjoying themselves enough attacked each other in the cities. Throats were cut for the last time. Then, everyone hastened to forget.
People did as little work as possible, and that was very little indeed; for centuries machines had been doing the work—but even they no longer produced much, now that there was no longer any reason to store products.
In the almost-empty schools, too—what was the point of learning?—no trouble was taken. The unfortunate children whose families had dumped them there refused to do any impositions, and treated the curriculum according to its merits, at last.
If no one worked any longer, they enjoyed themselves a great deal, and cheated one another. Not for love of gold—the metal that had sanctified calves in the times of Moses was no longer even respected; it retained a certain love, but a love without jealousy, which threw it out of doors and windows. No one collected wealth any more, as the bourgeoisie had once routinely done; on the contrary, they collected enjoyments, and for those they dispersed wealth. Gold had become what it ought to be, a powerful thing without its own power, the vector of life, nothing in itself and everything in its movement: the blood of the world, which nourishes if it circulates and corrupts if it clots.
Misers were admired, as anchorites of a sort; they were not understood. People with private incomes no longer existed, since the value of capital had disappeared with the possibility of prolonging its usage; thrift was dead, along with credit, no one lent money. Every resource was realized in order to be transformed into material for immediate expenditure, and all stocks and shares were obsolete, since there was nothing to enjoy but the present.
As for people who had wealth, they were fêted, as before. Where did they get it? People had better things to do than investigate anything. Everyone was too occupied with themselves to occupy themselves with others.
Ready to forgive anything, ready to approve anything, provided that he was allowed to share in everything, the individual offered liberty in return for condescension. “The more I allow, the more you will allow me.” Without anyone doing anything for anyone else, in the general egotism, they nevertheless helped one another to satisfy their desires, since everyone tolerated everything that did not hinder the expansion of their own desires. As in a jostling holiday crowd, they exchanged favors. A perpetual commerce of indulgent camaraderie momentarily brought together those transient beings, who forgot almost immediately, so urgent had existence become.
Was it not necessary to hasten to live, when death was hastening to arrive?
Everyone felt the same; people were similar; an exuberant banality comprised society.
The approach of death, by exasperating animal nervous tension, had, admittedly, exaggerated in each individual the tendencies typical of his nature, but in that excessive promiscuity, it had exaggerated common tendencies most of all. Now, above the tastes that are personal to us, two laws more powerful than ourselves impose themselves on all beings, to give us the double duty of preserving the individual and preserving the species: two indefeasible instincts, to live and to procreate. That is why, everywhere, the instinct to live, when excited, becomes a fury to live, while the instinct to love becomes a madness of lust.
And quickly!
To enjoy what remains. To profit, since one is about to lose everything! To drain the cup, before it breaks! Every man for himself, and death for all!
Everyone raced to live. Urgency reigned. A new animal stirred upon the earth, facile, hurried and benevolent; an expansive and joyous being, devoid of cares, devoid of dread, devoid of prejudices; a being that lived in order to live, and had nothing else to do. Humankind had regressed into full-blown animality
Ordinary people only think when they are bored; boredom had been abolished, as a waste of time, and people no longer thought.
They felt.
Like the dog that minds its own business, like the birds that flutters its wings amid the foliage, like the fly that circles in a sunbeam, and like Horace, they felt that life is pleasant, that light is pretty, that everything is beautiful and that time is fleeting. When they opened their eyes in the morning, people were glad to be still there; for two pins they would have shouted “Thank God!” Oh, the good Moon, which was not about to fall that evening! They were like an adolescent to whom a girl has confessed yesterday that she loves him with all her heart and who, as soon as he wakes up, is looking forward to the promised hours. To work! The profession of human beings was joy, and hardly anyone was on strike. No one concealed anything; mystery is the sublime enemy of laughter; no one wanted the sublime. Joy for joy’s sake! The fear of disaster did not trouble them—quite the opposite, since to think about imminent death was to think more of life.
“A pity, all the same, that it has to end!”
And quickly, they began again.
They slept little, because the hours were precious, and there was no need to husband their strength for old age.
They would even have liked to be in several places at once, in order that no pleasure should be monopolized by another, and if anyone in that world wept, it would only have been out of regret for not being ubiquitous. For pleasure, no one spared any difficulty, and the women of the time were able to affirm that an informed man is worth two.
People said: “Nothing matters, except the present moment.” Everywhere, however, there was an effort of memory toward the past, of aspiration toward the future, to relive everything there was and to live all that would not be.
