Chapter VI: Introduction (5)

Yes, yes, it is quite right to use one’s knowledge with discretion, just as it is quite right to use one’s wealth with discretion. But neither knowledge nor wealth is one’s self; they are something annexed, something that comes and goes, that can be taken or left. But I cannot make a discreet use of myself. If I am deprived of a shilling or a dollar I can submit to it, but I cannot easily submit to being deprived of an arm or, still less, of a piece of my soul. A shilling or a dollar I can give away discreetly, but an arm or a piece of my soul, these I can only tear off and give away passionately, that is to say indiscreetly. And I do not give ideas, I do not give knowledge--I give pieces of my soul. The ideas that I expound matter to me less, far less, than the way I expound them.

It is not the shilling that I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.

These antipathies that I provoke proceed--as well I know, in spite of whatever those who see only the surface may say--from the fact that I am not an intellectual but a man of passion. Almost all the things that I have said, hundreds, thousands, have said before me. I am neither erudite nor a savant. There is no great originality in my ideas. Whence, then, the potency which, thanks to God, I have attained? Whence these antipathies and sympathies, and how is it that I am able to say, thanks to God, that I am seldom read with indifference?--It is due to passion, to the tone of my voice.

Yes, I know it, I am antipathetic to many of my readers, and one of the things that makes me most antipathetic to them is my aggressiveness, my sometimes morbid aggressiveness. I don’t deny it. But the truth is, my friend, that this aggressiveness is directed against myself. When I attack others I am attacking myself. I live in a state of inward conflict. I imagine that I am misinterpreted? Very likely, since I myself do not always succeed in interpreting myself aright. The ideas that crowd in upon me from all quarters are always battling together in my mind and I fail to make peace between them. I fail because I don’t even try. I need these battles.

And, moreover I am not anxious for a reputation among scholars, for I am not a scholar, I am not what is called a scholar. Nor even among men of culture, although I am always preaching culture. But by culture I understand the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest desire. I come of a race which some people say is still, in its essence, in a state of savagery, a race of a turbulent and taciturn spirit, a race of which Salmerón said that it had not yet adapted itself to European civilization. And so far as I myself and my own branch of the race[4] are concerned, I accept this judgment and I accept it with pride.

No, no, friend, I am not a philanthropist. The hunger and thirst for God are too strong within me for me to love men in the philanthropic way. Needs must be sown among men germs of doubt, of distrust, of inquietude, and even of despair--why not? yes, even of despair--and if thereby they lose what they call happiness, since it is not really happiness, they have lost nothing.

And above all and before all, none of this living in peace with all the world! Living in peace with all the world--horrible, horrible, horrible! No, no, no, none of this living in peace. Peace, spiritual peace I mean, is usually a lie and is usually stagnation. I do not wish to live in peace either with others or with myself. I need war, inward war. We all need war.

Truth before peace. That is my watchword. And to give it greater brilliance I will write it in Latin: _veritas primus pace_. And it goes without saying that the war that I need as the sustenance of my life and of the lives of others is a spiritual war, not war with gun and sword.

All the rest--in spite of whatever the champions of the central current of culture and of disciplined solidarity and of respect for the so-called definitive conquests of the human spirit may say--all the rest I understand and I am even ready to applaud it if you like; but it is not my concern, it is not my lot to put myself at its service.

And above all, my friend, there is one thing that I have hated all my life and that I hope to die hating, and that is, becoming the prisoner of my public, submitting to follow the course marked out for me by my readers. I will not sacrifice my independence, above all I will not mortgage my future. You understand? I will not mortgage my future. I will keep it open and free.

And so I alienate sympathy?... Who knows? What I want to avoid is public indifference. Sympathies and antipathies are perhaps the same thing. Antipathy--now for a paradox!--is a form of sympathy. Reading me for the sake of being annoyed and quarrelling with what I say or my way of saying it, is the same as reading me and agreeing with what I say. To combat a man is one way of animating and confirming him.

I have put warmth and life into my books and it is for the sake of the warmth and life I have put into them that you read them. I have put passion into my books. Passion of hate, passion of disdain, passion of contempt very often--I don’t deny it. But does warmth come only from this thing that they call love and which, ninety times out of a hundred, is nothing but drivelling mawkishness and debility of spirit? And I have put my loves into my books too, those loves which beget my indignations, those loves which are the cause of my being so often harsh, severe, disdainful. Yes, love makes me antipathetic, a greater and purer love than that delusive sympathy which some people urge me to seek after.

Never, never, never! Let such apostleship be for others. Every man has his own destiny.

And this is not a presumption of superiority. No, don’t think that. If you suspect such a thing it is because you don’t know me. No, it is not that. I don’t condemn your opinion; I don’t regard the advice you give me as bad; I only say that it is no use to me. I tell you that you are mistaken about me. And not because you lack intelligence, no, a thousand times no. You are mistaken because each of us sets out from a different point of view, or rather from a different point of feeling. You appear to me to be an optimist, or at any rate a man who believes that progress will alleviate the pains of mankind; you speak with a certain unction of the noble crusade of thought and of the great enterprise of culture, and I believe that the best that this enterprise can do is to make us forget that we have been born and that we have to die. I confess that I have a tragic sense of life. I confess it without petulance or pedantry, and I know that you will not doubt my sincerity.

This bitterness that you find so disagreeable in my writings has grown with being exercised against myself. I am the sword and the whetstone and I sharpen my sword on myself. Hence it is that I am as tired with the sword-play as I am with sharpening the sword that I play with.

And if I am to tell you the truth, it hurts and wounds me to see men marching as confidently as if they marched on solid ground, some confident in the prejudices and anti-prejudices of their religious beliefs, others slaves of science, others slaves of ignorance, slaves all of them. I would have them doubt, I would have them suffer, above all I would have them despair, I would have them be men and not mere partisans of the party of progress. Despair, even though it be a resigned despair, is perhaps the highest state that man can attain to.

God, friend, did not send me into the world to be an apostle of peace, or to reap sympathy, but to be a sower of disquietude and irritation and to endure antipathy. Antipathy is the price of my redemption.

SOLILOQUIES