The Immoralist — Chapter 6

Chapter 7 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

I shall not speak of every stage of the journey. Some of them have left me only a confused memory; my health, now better and now worse, still faltered in a cold wind, took alarm at the shadow of a cloud, and my nervous condition brought on frequent disturbances; but my lungs at least were healing. Each relapse was shorter and less serious; its onset was as sharp as ever, but my body was becoming better armed against it.

From Tunis we had made our way to Malta, then to Syracuse; I was coming back to the classical land whose language and whose past I knew. Since the beginning of my illness I had lived without self-examination, without law, applying myself simply to living, as the animal or the child does. Less taken up with the illness now, my life was becoming certain and conscious again. After that long agony I had believed I was born again the same man and would soon tie my present back to my past; amid the sheer newness of an unknown country I could deceive myself so; here, no longer; everything here taught me the thing that still took me by surprise: I was changed.

When, at Syracuse and beyond it, I tried to take up my studies again, to plunge back, as I had once done, into the minute examination of the past, I discovered that something had, for me, if not destroyed my taste for it, at least altered that taste; it was the sense of the present. The history of the past now took on in my eyes that immobility, that terrifying fixity of the night shadows in the little courtyard at Biskra, the immobility of death. Before, I had taken pleasure in that very fixity, which made the precision of my mind possible; all the facts of history appeared to me like the pieces in a museum, or better, like the plants of a herbarium, whose final dryness helped me to forget that once, rich with sap, they had lived under the sun. Now, if I could still take pleasure in history, it was by imagining it in the present. The great political events were bound, therefore, to move me far less than the emotion that revived in me from the poets, or from certain men of action. At Syracuse I read Theocritus again, and thought that his shepherds with their lovely names were the very ones I had loved at Biskra.

My learning, waking at every step, encumbered me and stood in the way of my joy. I could not see a Greek theatre, a temple, without at once reconstructing it in the abstract. At each ancient festival, the ruin left standing in its place made me grieve that the festival was dead; and I had a horror of death.

I came to shun ruins; to prefer, to the finest monuments of the past, those low gardens they call the Latomie, where the lemons have the acid sweetness of oranges, and the banks of the Cyane, which, among the papyrus, still flows as blue as on the day it flowed to weep for Proserpine.

I came to despise in myself that scholarship which had at first been my pride; those studies, which had at first been my whole life, no longer seemed to me to bear more than a wholly accidental and conventional relation to me. I was discovering myself to be other, and I existed — oh joy! — outside them. As a specialist, I struck myself as stupid. As a man, did I know myself? I was only just being born, and could not yet know who it was I was being born as. That was the thing I had to learn.

Nothing is more tragic, for one who thought he would die of it, than a slow convalescence. After the wing of death has touched us, what seemed important is so no longer; other things are, which did not seem important, or which one did not even know existed. The heap of all our acquired knowledge flakes off our mind like greasepaint and here and there lets the flesh itself be seen bare, the authentic being that lay hidden.

From then on it was he whom I claimed to be discovering: the authentic being, the “old man,” the one the Gospel would have nothing more to do with; the one whom everything around me — books, teachers, family — and I myself had first tried to suppress. And already, because of all those later accretions, he appeared to me rougher and harder to discover, but for that very reason more worth discovering, and of greater worth. From then on I despised that secondary, learned being whom instruction had drawn over the top of him. Those accretions had to be shaken off.

And I compared myself to palimpsests; I tasted the joy of the scholar who, beneath more recent writing, discovers on the same sheet a very ancient text, infinitely more precious. What was it, this hidden text? To read it, must one not first of all efface the recent ones?

And indeed I was no longer the sickly, studious creature whom my former morality, rigid and restrictive as it was, had suited. There was more here than a convalescence; there was an increase, a fresh surge of life, the influx of a richer and warmer blood which was bound to touch my thoughts, to touch them one by one, to penetrate everything, to stir and to colour the remotest, most delicate and secret fibres of my being. For to robustness or to weakness one grows accustomed; a being composes itself according to the powers it has; but let those powers increase, let them make one capable of more, and… I did not have any of these thoughts at the time, and my picture here falsifies me. To tell the truth, I did not think at all, did not examine myself; a happy fatality was guiding me. I was afraid that too hasty a glance might come and disturb the mystery of my slow transformation. The effaced characters had to be given time to reappear; one must not try to shape them. — Leaving my brain, then, not abandoned but fallow, I gave myself up voluptuously to myself, to things, to the whole, which seemed to me divine. We had left Syracuse, and I was running along the steep road that joins Taormina to La Môle, crying out, to call it into me: A new being! A new being!

My one effort, my constant effort in those days, was therefore systematically to abhor or to suppress everything I believed I owed only to my past education and to my first morality. Out of a resolute disdain for my scholarship, out of contempt for my scholar's tastes, I refused to see Agrigento, and a few days later, on the road that leads to Naples, I did not stop at the beautiful temple of Paestum where Greece still breathes, and where I went, two years afterwards, to pray to I no longer know what god.

Why do I speak of a single effort? Could I take an interest in myself except as in a being capable of being perfected? Toward that unknown perfection, which I imagined only confusedly, my will had never been more exalted than it was in straining toward it; I employed that will entirely in strengthening my body, in bronzing it. Near Salerno, leaving the coast, we had made our way up to Ravello. There the keener air, the lure of rocks full of recesses and surprises, the unknown depth of the valleys, all lending themselves to my strength and to my joy, favoured my impulse.

Nearer to the sky than it is far from the shore, Ravello, on a sheer height, faces the distant flat coast of Paestum. Under Norman rule it was a town of some importance; it is now no more than a narrow village where we were, I think, the only foreigners. A former religious house, now turned into a hotel, took us in; set at the very end of the rock, its terraces and its garden seemed to hang out over the blue. Beyond the wall laden with vine branches, one saw at first nothing but the sea; one had to go close to the wall to be able to follow the cultivated descent which, by stairways more than by paths, joined Ravello to the shore. Above Ravello the mountain went on. Olive trees, enormous carob trees; in their shade, cyclamens; higher up, chestnut trees in great number, a cool air, the plants of the north; lower down, lemon trees near the sea. They are set out in small plots dictated by the slope of the ground; they are gardens in stairs, almost all alike; a narrow walk down the middle crosses them from one end to the other; one enters without a sound, like a thief. One dreams beneath that green shade; the foliage is thick, heavy; not one clear ray gets through; like drops of thick wax the lemons hang, fragrant; in the shade they are white and greenish; they are within reach of the hand, of thirst; they are sweet, sharp; they refresh.

The shade beneath them was so dense that I did not dare stop there after the climb, which still made me sweat. Yet the stairways no longer exhausted me; I trained myself to go up them with my mouth closed; I spaced out my halts more and more, telling myself: I shall get as far as that without weakening; then, having reached my goal, finding my reward in my satisfied pride, I breathed long and powerfully, and in such a way that I seemed to feel the air penetrating my chest more effectively. Into all this care of the body I carried over the assiduity of my former days. I was making progress.

I was sometimes astonished that my health should come back so quickly. I came to believe that I had at first exaggerated the gravity of my condition; to doubt that I had been very ill at all; to laugh at the blood I had spat; to regret that my recovery had not remained more arduous.

I had at first looked after myself very stupidly, knowing nothing of my body's needs. I made a patient study of it and became, in the matter of prudence and care, so unfailingly ingenious that I amused myself with it as with a game. What I still suffered from most was my morbid sensitivity to the least change of temperature. Now that my lungs were healed, I put this hyperaesthesia down to my nervous debility, a remnant of the illness. I resolved to conquer it. The sight of the fine tanned skins, looking as though the sun had soaked through them, which a few loosely dressed peasants showed as they worked in the fields with their jackets open, urged me to let myself be tanned in the same way. One morning, having stripped myself naked, I looked at myself; the sight of my too thin arms, of my shoulders, which the greatest efforts could not throw back far enough, but above all the whiteness, or rather the colourlessness of my skin, filled me with shame and with tears. I dressed again quickly and, instead of going down toward Amalfi as I had been in the habit of doing, made my way toward some rocks covered with short grass and moss, far from any dwelling, far from the roads, where I knew I could not be seen. Once there, I undressed slowly. The air was almost keen, but the sun was burning. I offered my whole body to its flame. I sat down, lay back, turned over. I felt the hard ground beneath me; the stirring of the wild grasses brushed against me. Though sheltered from the wind, I shivered and throbbed at every breath of it. Soon a delicious burning wrapped me round; my whole being flowed toward my skin.

We stayed a fortnight at Ravello; every morning I went back to those rocks and took my cure. Soon the excess of clothing in which I still wrapped myself became irksome and superfluous; my toughened skin stopped sweating perpetually and learned to protect itself by its own warmth.

On the morning of one of the last days (we were in the middle of April), I ventured further. In a cleft of the rocks I have spoken of, a clear spring ran. At that very spot it fell in a cascade, not a very copious one, it is true, but it had hollowed out beneath the fall a deeper basin where the very pure water lingered. Three times I had come to it, had leaned over it, had stretched myself out on the bank, full of thirst and full of desires; I had gazed long at the bottom of polished rock, where one could make out not a stain, not a blade of weed, and into which the sun penetrated, quivering and breaking into colours. On this fourth day I went forward, resolved in advance, as far as the water, clearer than ever, and, without thinking any longer, plunged into it all at once, my whole body. Chilled through at once, I left the water and stretched out on the grass, in the sun. Mints were growing there, sweet-smelling; I gathered some, crushed the leaves, and rubbed my whole body with them, wet as it was, but burning. I looked at myself for a long time, without any shame now, with joy. I found myself not robust yet, but able to become so, harmonious, sensual, almost beautiful.