The Poet's Guide to Life Read Online

The spring that god is supposed to notice must not remain in the trees and meadows but somehow has to assume its force within people, for then it takes place, as it were, not in time but in eternity and in god’s presence.

ON SOLITUDE

The Loneliest People Above All Contribute Most to Commonality

As a child, when I was being treated poorly by everyone, when I felt so infinitely abandoned, so absolutely lost in the unknown, there might have been a time when I longed to be elsewhere. But then while other human beings continued to be alien to me, I was drawn to things, and from these things there emanated a joy, a joy in being that always stayed consistently calm and strong and in which there was never any hesitation or doubt. In military school, after anxious, drawn-out struggles, I gave up my passionate Catholic child-piety, freed myself from it in order to be all the more inconsolably alone. Things, however, in their way of patiently enduring and lasting, later offered me a new, greater, and more pious love, a kind of belief with neither fear nor limit. Life also belongs to this belief. Ah, how I believe in it, in life. Not the life constituted by time but this other life, the life of small things, the life of animals and of the great plains. This life that continues through millennia with no apparent investment in anything, and yet with all of its forces of movement and growth and warmth in complete harmony. This is why cities weigh on me so heavily. This is why I love taking long barefoot walks where I will not miss a grain of sand and will make available to my body the entire world in many shapes as sensation, as experience, as something to relate to. This is why I exist, wherever possible, on vegetables alone, in order to come close to a simple awareness of life unaided by anything alien. That is why I will not drink wine, because I want nothing but my juices to speak out and rush through me and attain bliss, the way they do in children and animals, from deep within the self! And this is also why I want to strip myself of all arrogance and not consider myself superior to the tiniest animal or any more wonderful than a stone. But to be what I am, to live what I was meant to live, to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated to my heart: this is what I want—and this surely cannot be arrogance.

Whether you are surrounded by the singing of a lamp or the sounds of a storm, by the breathing of the evening or the sighing of the sea, there is a vast melody woven of a thousand voices that never leaves you and only occasionally leaves room for your solo. To know when you have to join in, that is the secret of your solitude, just as it is the art of true human interaction: to let yourself take leave of the lofty words to join in with the one shared melody.

The loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality. I have said earlier that one person might hear more and another less of the vast melody of life; accordingly, the latter has a smaller or lesser duty in the great orchestra. The individual who could hear the entire melody would be at once the loneliest and the most common, for he would hear what no one else hears and yet only because he would grasp in its perfect completeness that which others strain to hear obscurely and only in parts.

I have little to add except the following, which is valid in all cases: the advice, perhaps, to take solitude seriously and whenever it occurs to experience it as something good. The fact that other people fail to alleviate it should not be attributed to their indifference and withholding but because we are truly infinitely alone, each one of us, and unreachable with very rare exceptions. We must learn to live with this fact.

I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other’s solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness . . .

In such a case [of a fight] it is time (in my personal opinion) to withdraw into oneself and to approach neither the one nor the other person and to resist referring the suffering caused by them back to the cause of suffering (which lies so far outside), but to make it productive for yourself. If you move what happens inside your feelings into solitude and keep your wavering and trembling sensations out of dangerous proximity to magnetic forces, then it will assume on its own its most natural and necessary position. In any case, it helps to remind oneself very frequently that everything that exists is governed by laws that reign over all beings without ever relinquishing their force, but rather rush to prove and test themselves on every stone and every feather dropped by us. Whenever we are in error, then, such erring is nothing but the failure to recognize that we are governed by specific laws in every single case. Every attempt of a solution will begin with our attention and focus that quietly integrate us into the chain of events and restore to our will its swaying counterweights.

One may be much more literal in one’s dealings with a solitary individual. In a sense, the spaciousness to which he would otherwise not gain any relation is delimited from being something truly immeasurable by another person’s insights. But for someone who experiences life as a series of happy exchanges with others, the realm of existence is filled with realities, and such a person should be neither kept back at one discovery nor already set in anticipation for the next. His activity actually runs counter to that of the solitary individual: it is centrifugal and its gravitational effects are incalculable.

Incidentally, if I were young today, I would absolutely look for a daily, very heterogeneous way of applying myself and try to install myself in a tangible domain to the best of my abilities. Art today might be served better and more discreetly when it becomes the quiet affair of certain special days or years (which does not have to mean that it has to be carried out on the side or amateurishly; [Stéphane] Mallarmé, to cite the highest example, had been a teacher of English all of his life), but the “profession” itself is overcrowded with intruders, with interlopers, with exploiters of the increasingly hybridized trade, and it can be renewed and reinvested with meaning only by the quiet solitary individuals who do not consider themselves part of it and who accept none of the customs brought into circulation by literary authors.