Light by Henri Barbusse (good novels to read in english txt) 📕

and magnificent spaces; with patience and heroism must you clear the ways which lead from the individual to humanity, the ways which were stopped up with corpses of ideas and with stone images all along their great curving horizons. Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!

If you do that, you will be able to say that, at the moment when you planned your effort and took your decision, you saved the human species as far as it is possible on earth to do it. You will not have brought happiness about. The fallacy-mongers do not frighten us when they preach resignation and paralysis on the plea that no social change can bring happiness, thus trifling with these profound things. Happiness is part of the inner life, it is an intimate and personal paradise; it is a flash of chance or genius which comes sweetly to life among those who elbow each other, and it is also the sense of glory. No, it is not in your hands, and so it is in nobody's hands. But a balanced and heedful life is necessary to man, that he may build the isolated home of happiness; and death is the fearful connection of the happenings which pass away along with our profundities. External things and those which are hidden are essentially different, but they are held together by peace and by death.

To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the whole architecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications of human nature; await nothing from pity.

Charity is a privilege, and must disappear. For the rest, you cannot love unknown people any more than you can have pity on them. The human intelligence is made for infinity; the heart is not. The being who really suffers in his heart, and not merely in his mind or in words, by the suffering of others whom he neither sees nor touches, is a nervous abnormality, and he cannot be argued from as an example. The repulse of reason, the stain of absurdity, torture the intelligence in a more abundant way. Simple as it may be, social science is geometry. Do not accept the sentimental meaning they give to the word "humanitarianism," and say that the preaching of fraternity and love is vain; these words lose their meaning amid the great numbers of man. It is in this disordered confusion of feelings and ideas that one feels the presence of Utopia. Mutual solidarity is of the intellect--common-sense, logic, methodical precision, order without faltering, the ruthless inevitable perfection of light!

In my fervor, in my hunger, and from the depths of my abyss, I uttered these words aloud amid the silence. My great reverie was blended with song, like the Ninth Symphony.

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I am resting on my elbows at the window. I am looking at the night, which is everywhere, which touches me, _me_, although I am only I, and it is infinite night. It seems to me that there is nothing else left me to think about. Things cling together; they will save each other, and will do their setting in order.

But again I am seized by the sharpest of my agonies--I am afraid that the multitude may rest content with the partial gratifications to be granted them everywhere by those who will use all their clinging, cunning power to prevent the people from understanding, and then from wishing. On the day of victory, they will pour intoxication and dazzling deceptions into you, and put almost superhuman cries into your mouths, "We have delivered humanity; we are the soldiers of the Right!" without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, of immense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respect for great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who are trying to deliver themselves. They will again take up their eternal mission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning them aside from their ends. They will appeal for union and peace and patience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going too quickly, or of meddling in your neighbor's affairs, and all the other fallacies of the sort. They will try again to ridicule and strike down those whom the newspapers (the ones in their pay) call dreamers, sectarians, and traitors; once again they will flourish all their old talismans. Doubtless they will propose, in the fashionable words of the moment, some official parodies of international justice, which they will break up one day like theatrical scenery; they will enunciate some popular right, curtailed by childish restrictions and monstrous definitions, resembling a brigand's code of honor. The wrong torn from confessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere--in the sham republics, and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game. The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracy again, and perpetuate it. One imperialism will replace the other, and the generations to come will be marked for the sword. Soldier, wherever you are, they will try to efface your memory, or to exploit it, by leading it astray, and forgetfulness of the truth is the first form of your adversity! May neither defeat nor victory be against you. You are above both of them, for you are all the people.

The skies are peopled with stars, a harmony which clasps reason close, and applies the mind to the adorable idea of universal unity. Must that harmony give us hope or misgiving?

We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shall wake up to-morrow. We have only one succor--_we_ know of what the night is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian? Public opinion floats over the surface of the peoples, wavering and submissive to the wind; it lends but fleeting conscience and conviction to the majority; it cries "Down with the reformers!" It cries "Sacrilege!" because it is made to see in its vague thoughts what it could not itself see there. It cries that they are distorting it, whereas they are enlarging it.

I am not afraid, as many are, and as I once was myself, of being reviled and slandered. I do not cling to respect and gratitude for myself. But if I succeed in reaching men, I should like them not to curse me. Why should they, since it is not for myself? It is only because I am sure I am right. I am sure of the principles I see at the source of all--justice, logic, equality; all those divinely human truths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is so heart-breaking. And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidence which fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once as a command and as a prayer. There are not several ways of attaining it athwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again; there is only one--right-doing. Let rule begin again with the sublime control of the intellect. I am a man like the rest, a man like you. You who shake your head or shrug your shoulders as you listen to me--why are we, we two, we all, so foreign to each other, when we are not foreign?

I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious statues of Right and Duty. To-night I believe--nay, I am certain--that the new order will be built upon that archipelago of men. Even if we have still to suffer as far as we can see ahead, the idea can no more cease to throb and grow stronger than the human heart can; and the will which is already rising here and there they can no longer destroy.

I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the fulfillment of international truth. But if the great powers of darkness persist in holding their positions, if they whose clear cries of warning should be voices crying in the wilderness--O you people of the world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I appeal to your justice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels which drench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of shipwrecks, over the jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon the sand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary by reason of error's disorder. Revolution is Order.

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CHAPTER XXIII


FACE TO FACE

Through the panes I see the town--I often take refuge at the windows. Then I go into Marie's bedroom, which gives a view of the country. It is such a narrow room that to get to the window I must touch her tidy little bed, and I think of her as I pass it. A bed is something which never seems either so cold or so lifeless as other things; it lives by an absence.

Marie is working in the house, downstairs. I hear sounds of moved furniture, of a broom, and the recurring knock of the shovel on the bucket into which she empties the dust she has collected. That society is badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants. Marie, who is as good as I am, will have spent her life in cleaning, in stooping amid dust and hot fumes, over head and ears in the great artificial darkness of the house. I used to find it all natural. Now I think it is all anti-natural.

I hear no more sounds. Marie has finished. She comes up beside me. We have sought each other and come together as often as possible since the day when we saw so clearly that we no longer loved each other!

We sit closely side by side, and watch the end of the day. We can see the last houses of the town, in the beginning of the valley, low houses within enclosures, and yards, and gardens stocked with sheds. Autumn is making the gardens quite transparent, and reducing them to nothing through their trees and hedges; yet here and there foliage still magnificently flourishes. It is not the wide landscape in its entirety which attracts me. It is more worth while to pick out each of the houses and look at it closely.

These houses, which form the finish of the suburb, are not big, and are not prosperous; but we