Illusions of Immortality, page 11
They dreamed of inventing new sensual experiences.
Thus, uniformly, all over the world, those people clad in their glad rags were rejoicing, clear-sighted, frivolous, and above all futile: entire cities cutting loose.
When an agile woman, her breasts thrust out, appeared at a street corner, saying “Where can I get it?” a passer-by, without stopping, followed her with a rapid gaze: “Perhaps I won’t have time.” There was much of it to be found, however, and the pleas did not last long. “You’re beautiful.” The woman smiled—and voilà. Often, they eyes sufficed to say everything, as they always have sufficed—but words no longer gave the lie to the gaze.
Things were simplified.
For nothing more resembles the general soul of a people than the fashion in which they conceive the act of love. Among all barbarians, it is natural, like drinking and eating; in over-civilized epochs, it becomes impure and mystical at the same time; to the atheists of the Selenian Era, it had lost any sacred character and become jovial, savant and nimble, devoid of majesty.
One invited a woman to intercourse as we issue invitations to dinner; one waited in a kissing-room,19 next to a low divan, small tables being laden with elixirs and fruits; she arrived, ceremoniously or unceremoniously, and sat down politely. Well-brought-up men returned a visit, as after a meal.
A bad century for the jealous! They were deceived at the drop of a hat. Fortunately, the jealous, like their brethren the miserly, were very hard to find. Nevertheless, in the wreckage of all the sentiments that had once encumbered love and hindered the course of it affairs, a little jealousy had survived; it went back, in fact, to instinctive, animal causes, absent from the other mystical imaginations added by the human species to the natural need for sex, and that powerful origin permitted it, like any other malady, still to manifest itself—but it was not considered to be anything more than a pathological symptom, an idiosyncrasy, whose manifestation was deplored, as if it were a matter of gout or asthma.
Couples scarcely cultivated it; the model household was one in which the husband assisted the wife’s pleasures, and vice versa. No one was deceived and everyone was content.
Everyone loved as they wished.
Fathers, no longer having to save the dignity of their name, closed the eyes of honor, and virgins slept where they liked.
Incest was seen again, as in the world’s infancy.
A few morose old men muttered: “In my time...” They were lying, though, and the other of the family imposed silence on them with an amiable word.
“Did you enjoy yourself, daughter?” What did a lost virginity matter? They were no longer sold in exchange for the plush situation offered by a good marriage. In what drawing-room would anyone pull a face at virginal high spirits? There were none of like that, and would soon be none at all.
What harm was there in introducing beings of unknown blood to a hearth? The hearth was about to be pulverized. Was there a devoted mother who would care about having it said that her child was a bastard? They all were, and the child would not live, any more than anyone else would.
No one, therefore, took the usual precautions for the sake of virtue, but solely to avoid being accidentally deprived of joy, deprived of life.
For the ugliest or the most hurried, specialist physicians kept studs populated by handsome males, and offered all the comforts of luxury in bathrooms or playrooms. Sensible mothers took their daughters to such places for reasons of prudence. Music and good manners were cultivated there.
It will easily be recognized that such license would be impossible as a social system, since human beings always want to go further than they do and can. But so what? The work did not have to be continued. The world was really and truly coming to an end, and it would perish even if the Moon did not fulfill its mission, for an excess of living had always caused peoples to perish; like consumptives and torches, they acquire on a frenzy of hot vitality at the moment when their fire is about to go out.
We would be wrong, however, to be too rancorous in regard the people who will live in that time. Not only were the present conditions inciting them to behave in that was, but they had received nothing from the past that encouraged them to behave in any other way. Atavism had prepared them. What shapes the convictions of a race and its social soul is not reason but habit. People reason far less than they feel. If it is true to say that mores are born of belief, it is necessary to admit that mores engender belief in their turn; morality is born of long custom, and indisputable things are merely things that are very old. A way of behaving, even if it is immoral, infallibly becomes respectable when it has served several successive ancestral generations.
No more than any other, this one had not surged forth abruptly; it had been adapted and developed, progressing and becoming refined, from generation to generation, to the extent that chastity finally became unnatural; sex became a function again; license was a right; the pleasure obtained therefrom appeared as a duty, because of the person who gave it; polygamy became necessary and fidelity ridiculous; incontinence, no longer being a vice, because a physical virtue.
People no longer gloried in escaping what the dogmas of the distant past had reproved under the name of human weaknesses, but they took honor in showing themselves capable of them, for carnal ecstasy ceased to be an act of weakness and became a feat of strength. Sensuality no longer reduced us to the level of the beasts but, on the contrary, raised us to the rank of humans; no one was ashamed of it, but proud, since it proved a capability. No one any longer scorned the body, the source of joys; it was almost venerated. Virtue was inverted; conventions were read from the other side of the coin, and the old immorality was moral.
The soul was defunct, as I have told you; no one was any longer occupied with it; the body was about to die; that as what concerned people.
Still, it is necessary to spell it out: these people were not, in sum, much less estimable than us. Virtue does not reside solely in the act, but, above all, in the intention that determines the act. To save her honor, Dorothea20 defended herself against her valet; she had him thrown into a gulf in the Sierra, and that was an expression of virtue; if her foot had slipped on a pebble, the valet would have thrown Dorothea down, and that would have been a crime. Was it, therefore, up to the pebble, to decide whether the homicidal struggle was or was not praiseworthy? No, but although the result would always have been a murder, the intentions differed: one intention was acting in accordance with the laws of virtue, the other contrary to them. What makes the morality of an act is the intention, what forms the intention is the will; for the valid use of the will it is necessary to know why one desires something, and to know that, it is first necessary to reason in order to comprehend it.
Now, it is rare that ordinary people—concierges, generals, rentiers—try to understand themselves or to reason. The will tell you themselves that they act “quite naturally” and that “it just comes to them.” Personally, I even think that they’re proud of it. They have honesty “in the blood.” It’s unconscious, isn’t it? But true virtue is conscious. Whether that bourgeois honesty comes from education, atavism or race, it comes from outside the self; it is learned, and not understood; it does not belong to the person who exercises it, and since its exercise is devoid of intention, he has it as if he did not have it—which is to say that, with regard to pure morality, he has none. The sole virtue is to comprehend virtue, and there is no honest man, nor good man, nor wise man, who can be honest, wise and good without knowing why he is thus.
From which it follows that, in spite of appearances, we are no richer in morality than those reprobates of the Selenian Era, and that even if, in reality, we behave better, it is necessary to confess that, in truth, we are no more meritorious.
Similarly, we would be wrong to believe that those beings, because they will differ from us, are coarse and brutal. Too many centuries had refined them; furthermore, their function was to live pleasantly, and the majority achieved it. Their license was elegant. Humans had retained for sensuality the only delicacy that was still in him. Joy became over-subtle, like a theological matter. Pleasure was more than a fashion; it was a kind of worship.
Death being god, sensuality was religion, and sexual intercourse sang the mass.
And death—more than springtime, more than nests full of birdsong and clumps of lilacs shading grassy divans, more than fresh and inviting springs, more than the perfume of flowers and the warmth of oriental days, more than shadow itself—death cried: “Make love!”
Pious in their fashion, the last humans obeyed the last god and thus lived according to its law, with the result that that depraved world was, nevertheless, like a supreme temple, and its cupola was the sky, in which the real symbol of god was traveling mathematically.
Their death, from on high, watched them stir, and caressed them in advance with its white radiance. They admired that radiance on their hands; then they raised their heads, their gaze encountered the radiance. Death and the dying contemplated one another, face to face, without hatred, expectantly.
And quickly, they returned to living! It had its orbit, they had their joy. Quickly, to joy!
Only a few more weeks remained to live. The refined took care to contract a marriage in extremis, and betrothed themselves for the afternoon of the third of April, in order to flourish at the supreme moment.
Laughter made them feverish them, however. Anxiety aggravated the nerves. But still, over the entire surface of the globe, an enormous cry rose up, as long as an orgasmic cry and as poignant as a death-rattle: an immense cry of gratitude: “It’s good! It’s good!”
Human life blossomed, and all of its joys were realities.
Only the artist conjured up chimeras.
III
A painter, whose name will only be known to his contemporaries, lived in those days.
He was one of the most bizarre beings that one could imagine in his era: he ate and drank just enough to nourish himself; when music was played in his presence, he blinked his eyes or shielded them with his hand, and that was assuredly not to hear better; he went walking on his own, his hands behind his back, scarcely saying a word to those he met; he studied celebrations without involving himself in them; he undressed women severely, like a judge, and, even though he was still young and handsome, only took a congruent portion of love, for reasons of hygiene; he did not refuse his favors, but was not prodigal with them.
He was taken for an ascetic. To tell the truth, he was no more of one than anyone else, but he sought his sensualities within himself, and found them. Precisely because he was happy, he was believed to be sad—for society does not willingly imagine that what it considers to be joys can be no more than tedium for some, and the majority will always refuse to admit that intense pleasures can exist of which it is ignorant. It will smile on hearing that the voluptuousness of art is exactly analogous to the voluptuousness of love, that both have creation for an end, the one ecstasizing the mind as the other ecstasizes the flesh, and that they are the two forms of sexual intercourse.
In that quasi-divine intoxication of bearing within himself the male and female principles, and of fecundating himself, the hallucinated individual of whom we are speaking scorned the other pleasures; he locked himself away in his periods of work, as with an adored mistress; every new work was a virgin who gave herself to him; he contemplated her for a long time with the eyes of thought before daring to approach her, and stroked her timidly at first, as if he were afraid of frightening her; then came the first caresses, and the hectic nuptials in which the joy perpetuated itself to engender joy, for a long time, until the work was finished; it was then like an act of love that was concluded; the deliria of passion were succeeded by sympathetic indifference. But almost immediately, the haunting glimpse of some work excited once again the desire for imminent possessions, and a new engagement was made, and the marriage recommenced.
What was the fate subsequently reserved by opinion for the ardently cherished work? He hardly cared about that; when the loved one leaves us to descend into the street and prostitute herself to passers-by, whether she is a woman or a work of art, the promiscuities are nothing but disgrace and the frictions mere soiling; she is no longer ours; she is stained; she has gone; all the happiness she could give, we have taken, we have had it, the love is dead. Those who create to extract profit from the work and not to enjoy it immediately are false artists, comparable to false lovers who take a woman for the money she brings, or will bring, to them.
Perhaps, anyway, our hero was a bad painter; a passion for art is not always sufficient to bestow talent, and in the same way that there are sterile couples, there exist artists without works. In miserable minds, the germ of an idea prepares itself in the egg, and stirs dully, but the intercourse of art never fertilizes it; unisexual minds, incomplete powers, they strive to create, and give themselves the illusion of it, while engendering only death, and their work is like the cemetery of their thought.
It does not matter; they have loved, they have believed, hoped, desired, if only for a moment. It’s good.
So, the person with whom we are concerned delighted himself in that love, and, thanks to it, found life so good that he regretted soon having to quit it.
As others around him felt vaguely sad as they watched a woman pass by whom they would perhaps never possess, he was grief-stricken in glimpsing a harmony that he would not have the leisure to transpose on to a canvas.
One morning, a sudden idea made him leap out of bed, and his heart beat forcefully.
The end of the world!
The expectation and obsession of preceding centuries took a special form in him: people were going to see a unique landscape, a prodigious landscape!
Elect among a race of the Elect, he could for his own joy, multiply by art the sensation promised to everyone. What artist, throughout the ages, had been favored as much as him, as happy as him?
He wept with tenderness, and perhaps with gratitude.
He got up in haste, and bought a newspaper in order to read the exact position of the Moon, which the papers indicated every day.
Where should he take up his position?
The encounter of the planet and its satellite was to take place in the Indies, at 81° of longitude and 7° of latitude, in the south of Ceylon: the eastern slope of the Perotallagalla21 would be struck by Mount Aristillus, situated north-east of the lunar Sahara designated by the name of Mare Serenitatis.
“That’s where it’s necessary to go.”
He had four full months ahead of him, to transport himself to the locale and organize his installation.
Without delay, he assembled all his pecuniary credit, packed his apparatus and a few supplies, and then, leaving the door open so that others might take advantage of his house and what he was leaving therein, he departed.
He saw, to his annoyance, that pleasure trains, steamships and aerostats were leaving at every moment for the Island of the Impact, were the influx would be great. In fact, all those who were chaste by temperament, or tranquil, or sad; all the contemplators unamused by action; all the bored, nostalgic and gastralgic; all the impotent, and the old, and excessively thin women—all those who, for any reason whatsoever, were turning away from life—were heading out there in droves, to get a better view.
Then again, it was elegant, for it gave one the appearance of an intellectual, a stoic or an artist. With the result that a vile population abounded on that excessively narrow island; the countless hotels were overflowing with human being, especially on the mountains and the plateaux; people were keeping away from the sea and low-lying areas because of the formidable tide that would rise as the satellite approached.
These tourists were intent on the honor of being crushed first, if only a few seconds before the rest of the Terrans; it would have been truly stupid to get oneself drowned by a tidal wave an hour before the end of the world, and not see anything! Thus, people were choosing places, and everyone was busy organizing his last minute appropriately.
The artist installed himself for his last work.
Almost at the summit of Perotallagalla, he had a cage of crystal and steel erected, on powerful foundations, orientated in such a way that the view extended toward the point on the horizon where the phenomenon was to be manifest. He had supervised the construction with a jealous and paternal curiosity, as if the thing was already an integral part of the work so cherished in advance; now he awaited the hour, frenetically, and as soon as the last night arrived, in the middle of which the dawn of death ought to rise from a new Orient, he headed for the cage.
He suppressed an urge to run. Never had life seemed so exquisite to him. He went in, full of an intoxication which spread a concentrated sensuality through his entire body from the heights of his mind; one might have thought that he was going into the bedroom of a long-desired spouse, a sort of temple where a mysterious and possessive love was about to bloom. Exhausted by the excitement of hope, his legs buckled; in order to rest, he sat down on a stool, his heart beating rapidly and his palette in his hand. Life was enraptured within him. Was he living more or less than a little while ago? He was a new man. He was rejuvenated, and felt as a child feels, but he was as weak as an old man. The blood flowed so powerfully within his arteries that he right hand trembled, to the point of jiggling on his knee.
“I won’t be able to do it!”
He tried to place a dry brush at an exact point on the canvas, but he could not do it, his hand was shaking so persistently.
Then his joy became anxious, so much so that it resembled suffering.
He contemplated the forms around him without seeing them, with wide animal eyes; and because it was the hour when the beast no longer existed before the mind, it seemed, on the contrary, that the beast dwelt alone therein. He experienced an enormous lassitude in all his limbs, and, as if he had expended in the desire for his work all the strength that he would need to accomplish it, he was exhausted in advance by the imminent effort. Discouraged by having to furnish it for a second time, cowardly before the imminence, humble at not having been so earlier, and as mild as someone defeated, he waited.
