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
