Thomas The Obscure (8 page)

"I am sad; the evening is coming. But I also experience the opposite of sadness. I am at that point where it is sufficient to experience a little melancholy to feel hate and joy. I feel that I am tender, not only toward men but toward their passions. I love them, loving the feelings by which one might have loved them. I bring them devotion and life at the second degree: to separate us there is nothing more than that which would have united us, friendship, love. In the depths of myself, at the end of the day, strange emotions are deposited which take me for their object. I love myself with the spirit of revulsion, I calm myself with fear, I taste life in the feeling which separates me from it. All these passions, forced within me, produce nothing other than that which I am and the entire universe exhausts its rage to make me feel something, vaguely, of myself, feel some being which does not feel itself. Now calm comes down with the night. I can no longer name a single feeling. If I were to call my present state impassivity, I could just as well call it fire. What I feel is the source of that which is felt, the origin believed to be without
feeling,
the indiscernible impulse of enjoyment and revulsion. And, it is true, I feel nothing. I am reaching regions where that which one experiences has no relation with that which is experienced. I go down into the hard block of marble with the sensation of slipping into the sea. I drown myself in mute bronze. Everywhere hardness, diamond, pitiless fire, and yet the sensation is that of foam. Absolute absence of desire. No movement, no phantom of movement, neither anything immobile. It is in such great poverty, such absence, that I recognize all the passions from which I have been withdrawn by an insignificant miracle. Absent from Anne, absent from my love for Anne to the extent that I loved Anne. And absent, doubly, from myself, carried each time by desire beyond desire and destroying even this nonexistent Thomas where I felt I truly existed. Absent from this absence, I back away infinitely. I lose all contact with the horizon I am fleeing. I flee my flight. Where is the end? Already the void seems to me the ultimate in fullness: I understood it, I experienced it, I exhausted it. Now I am like a beast terrified by its own leap. I am falling in horror of my fall. I aspire vertiginously to reject myself from myself. Is it night? Have I come back, another, to the place where I was? Again there is a supreme moment of calm. Silence, refuge of transparency for the soul. I am terrified by this peace. I experience a sweetness which contains me for a moment and consumes me. If I had a body, I would grip my throat with my hands. I would like to suffer. I would like to prepare a simple death for myself, in an agony in which I would tear myself to pieces. What peace! I am ravaged by delights. There is no longer anything of me which does not open itself to this future void as if to a frightful enjoyment. No notion, no image, no feeling sustains me. Whereas just a moment ago I felt nothing, simply experiencing each feeling as a great absence, now in the complete absence of feelings I experience the strongest feeling. I draw my fright from the fright which I do not have. Fright, terror, the metamorphosis passes all thought. I am at grips with a feeling which reveals to me that I cannot experience it, and it is at that moment that I experience it with a force which makes it an inexpressible torment. And that is nothing, for I could experience it as something other than what it is, fright experienced as enjoyment. But the horror is that there emerges within it the consciousness that no feeling is possible, and likewise no thought and no consciousness. And the worst horror is that in apprehending it, far from dissipating it like a phantom by touching it, I cause it to increase beyond measure. I experience it as not experiencing it and as experiencing nothing, being nothing, and this absurdity is its monstrous substance. Something totally absurd serves as my reason. I feel myself dead—no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead. I discover my being in the vertiginous abyss where it is not, an absence, an absence where it sets itself like a god. I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness. A feeling which has to be given a name and which I call anguish. Here is the night. The darkness hides nothing. My first perception is that this night is not a provisional absence of light. Far from being a possible locus of images, it is composed of all that which is not seen and is not heard, and, listening to it, even a man would know that, if he were not a man, he would hear nothing. In true night, then, the unheard, the invisible are lacking, all those things that make the night habitable. It does not allow anything other than itself to be attributed to it; it is impenetrable. I am truly in the beyond, if the beyond is that which admits of no beyond. Along with the feeling that everything has vanished, this night brings me the feeling that everything is near me. It is the supreme relationship which is sufficient unto itself; it leads me eternally to itself, and an obscure race from the identical to the identical imparts to me the desire of a wonderful progress. In this absolute repetition of the same is born true movement which cannot lead to rest. I feel myself directed by the night toward the night. A sort of being, composed of all that which is excluded from being, presents itself as the goal of my undertaking. That which is not seen, is not understood, is not, creates right beside me the level of another night, and yet the same, toward which I aspire unspeakably, though I am already mingled with it. Within my reach there is a world—I call it world, as, dead, I would call the earth nothingness. I call it world because there is no other possible world for me. Just as when one moves toward an object, I believe I am making it come closer, but
it
is the one that understands
me.
Invisible and outside of being, it perceives me and sustains me in being. Itself, I perceive it, an unjustifiable chimera if I were not there, I perceive it, not in the vision I have of it, but in the vision and the knowledge it has of me. I am seen. Beneath this glance, I commit myself to a passivity which, rather than diminishing me, makes me real. I seek neither to distinguish it, nor to attain it, nor to suppose it. Perfectly negligent, by my distraction I retain for it the quality of inaccessibility which is appropriate to it. My senses, my imagination, my spirit, all are dead on the side on which it looks at me. I seize it as the sole necessity, that which is not even a hypothesis ... as my sole resistance, I who am annihilating myself. I am seen. Porous, identical to the night, which is not seen, I am seen.

Being as imperceptible as it is, I know it as it sees me. It is even the last possibility I have of being seen, now that I no longer exist. It is that glance which continues to see me in my absence. It is the eye that my disappearance requires more and more as it becomes more complete, to perpetuate me as an object of vision. In the night we are inseparable. Our intimacy is this very night. Any distance between us is suppressed, but suppressed in order that we may not come closer one to the other. It is a friend to me, a friendship which divides us. It is united with me, a union which distinguishes us. It is myself, I who do not exist for myself. In this instant, I have no existence except for it, which exists only for me. My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe? I feel that in every part of me, invisible and nonexistent, I am supremely, totally visible. Marvelously bound, I offer in a single unique image the expression of the world. Without color, inscribed in no thinkable form, neither the product of a powerful brain, I am the sole necessary image. On the retina of the absolute eye, I am the tiny inverted image of all things. In my scale, I bestow upon it the personal vision not only of the sea, but of the hillside still ringing with the cry of the first man. There, everything is distinct, everything is melted together. To the prism that I am, a perfect unity restores the infinite dissipation which makes it possible to see everything without seeing anything. I renew the crude undertaking of Noah. I enclose within my absence the principle of totality which is real and perceptible only for the absurd being who overflows totality, for that absurd spectator who examines me, loves me and draws me powerfully into his absurdity. To the extent that I contain within me that whole to which I offer (as the water offered Narcissus) the reflection in which it desires itself, I am excluded from the whole and the whole itself is excluded therefrom, and yet more is the prodigious one who is absent excluded, absent from me and from everything, absent for me as well, and yet for whom I work alone at this absurdity which he accepts. All of us are condemned by the same logical proscription, all three of us (a number which is monstrous when one of the three is everything). We are united by the mutual check in which we hold each other, with this difference, that it is only with reference to my contemplator that I am the irrational being, representing everything outside of him, but it is also with reference to him that I cannot be irrational, if he himself represents the reason of this existence outside of everything. Now, in this night, I come forward bearing everything, toward that which infinitely exceeds everything. I progress beyond the totality which I nevertheless tightly embrace. I go on the margins of the universe, boldly walking elsewhere than where I can be, and a little outside of my steps. This slight extravagance, this deviation toward that which cannot be, is not only my own impulse leading me to a personal madness, but the impulse of the reason which I bear with me. With me the laws gravitate outside the laws, the possible outside the possible. O night, now nothing will make me be, nothing will separate me from you. I adhere marvelously to the simplicity to which you invite me.

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of
light,
for
this
void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity. You attain entire possession of yourself in abstention. You give to the infinite the glorious feeling of its limits. O night, I make you taste your ecstasy. I perceive in myself the second night which brings you the consciousness of your barrenness. You bloom into new restrictions. By my mediation, you contemplate yourself eternally. I am with you, as if you were my creation. My creation. . . . What strange light is this which falls upon me? Could the effort to expel myself from every created thing have made of me the supreme creator? Having stretched all my strength against being, I find myself again at the heart of creation. Myself, working against the act of creating, I have made myself the creator. Here I am, conscious of the absolute as of an object I am creating at the same time I am struggling not to create myself. That which has never had any principle admits me at its eternal beginning, I who am the stubborn refusal of my own beginning. It is I, the origin of that which has no origin. I create that which cannot be created. Through an all-powerful ambiguity, the uncreated is the same word for it and for me. For it, I am the image of what it would be, if it did not exist. Since it is not possible that it should exist, by my absurdity I am its sovereign reason. I force it to exist. O night, I am itself. Here it has drawn me into the trap of its creation. And now it is the one that forces me to exist. And I am the one who is its eternal prisoner. It creates me for itself alone. It makes me, nothingness that I am, like unto nothingness. In a cowardly way it delivers me to joy."

XII

T
HOMAS
WENT
OUT
into the country and saw that spring was beginning. In the distance, ponds spread forth their murky waters, the sky was dazzling, life was young and free. When the sun climbed on the horizon, the genera, the races, even the species of the future, represented by individuals with no species, peopled the solitude in a disorder full of splendor. Dragonflies without wing-cases, which should not have flown for ten million years, tried to take flight; blind toads crawled through the mud trying to open their eyes which were capable of vision only in the future. Others, drawing attention to themselves through the transparency of time, forced whoever looked at them to become a visionary by a supreme prophecy of the eye. A dazzling light in which, illuminated, impregnated by the sun, everything was in movement to receive the glint of the new flames. The idea of perishing pushed the chrysalis to become a butterfly; death for the green caterpillar consisted of receiving the dark wings of the sphinx moth, and there was a proud and defiant consciousness in the mayflies which gave the intoxicating impression that life would go on forever. Could the world be more beautiful? The ideal of color spread out across the fields. Across the transparent and empty sky extended the ideal of light. The fruitless trees, the flowerless flowers bore freshness and youth at the tips of their stems. In place of the rose, the rose-bush bore a black flower which could not wilt. The spring enveloped Thomas like a sparkling night and he felt himself called softly by this nature overflowing with joy. For him, an orchard bloomed at the center of the earth, birds flew in the nothingness and an immense sea spread out at his feet. He walked. Was it the new brilliance of the light? It seemed that, through a phenomenon awaited for centuries, the earth now saw him. The primroses allowed themselves to be viewed by his glance which did not see. The cuckoo began its unheard song for his deaf ear. The universe contemplated him. The magpie he awoke was already no more than a universal bird which cried out for the profaned world. A stone rolled, and it slipped through an infinity of metamorphoses the unity of which was that of the world in its splendor. In the midst of these tremblings, solitude burst forth. Against the depths of the sky a radiant and jealous face was seen to rise up, whose eyes absorbed all other faces. A sound began, deep and harmonious, ringing inside the bells like the sound no one can hear. Thomas went forward. The great misfortune which was to come still seemed a gentle and tranquil event. In the valleys, on the hills, his passing spread out like a dream on the shining earth. It was strange to pass through a perfumed spring which held back its scents, to contemplate flowers which, with their dazzling colors, could not be perceived. Birds splashed with color, chosen to be the repertory of shades, rose up, presenting red and black to the void. Drab birds, designated to be the conservatory of music without notes, sang the absence of song. A few mayflies were still seen flying with real wings, because they were going to die, and that was all. Thomas went his way and, suddenly, the world ceased to hear the great cry which crossed the abysses. A lark, heard by no one, tossed forth shrill notes for a sun it did not see and abandoned air and space, not finding in nothingness the pinnacle of its ascent. A rose which bloomed as he passed touched Thomas with the brilliance of its thousand corollas. A nightingale that followed him from tree to tree made its extraordinary mute voice heard, a singer mute for itself and for all others and nevertheless singing the magnificent song. Thomas went forward toward the city. There was no longer sound or silence. The man immersed in the waves piled up by the absence of flood spoke to his horse in a dialogue consisting of a single voice. The city which spoke to itself in a dazzling monologue of a thousand voices rested in the debris of illuminated and transparent images. Where, then, was the city? Thomas, at the heart of the agglomeration, met no one. The enormous buildings with their thousands of inhabitants were deserted, deprived of that primordial inhabitant who is the architect powerfully imprisoned in the stone. Immense unbuilt cities. The buildings were piled one on the other. Clusters of edifices and monuments accumulated at the intersections. Out to the horizon, inaccessible shores of stone were seen rising slowly, impasses which led to the cadaverous apparition of the sun. This somber contemplation could not go on. Thousands of men, nomads in their homes, living nowhere, stretched out to the limits of the world. They threw themselves, buried themselves in the earth where, walled between bricks carefully cemented by Thomas, while the enormous mass of things was smashed beneath a cloud of ashes, they went forward, dragging the immensity of space beneath their feet. Mingling with the rough beginnings of creation, for an infinitely small time they piled up mountains. They rose up as stars, ravaging the universal order with their random course. With their blind hands, they touched the invisible worlds to destroy them. Suns which no longer shone bloomed in their orbits. The great day embraced them in vain. Thomas still went forward. Like a shepherd he led the flock of the constellations, the tide of star-men toward the first night. Their procession was solemn and noble, but toward what end, and in what form? They thought they were still captives within a soul whose borders they wished to cross.