Of all man’s gods, Time is the only one that is truly silent. The hand of time idly counts the number of fallen leaves with the same indifference that it counts the numbers of the dead. It is not the hand of time that touches everything with decay, that introduces the singular tragic element of change into people and things. It is the human heart that accomplishes that: present in the note of music that could have risen a little further, the smile that faded a moment too soon, or the embrace that could have been a bit warmer, we find this vanity.
Life is only the first note in that unknown song which, long before it has been finished, death will silence. Our hopes, dreams, and our art resolve just as little life. It is fitting that we mortals should only feel love between the beatings of our heart, as one of Castilho’s poems declares. That mortal heart stirs with the contemplation of beauty, and rests in the contemplation of its disappointment. So close are these two moments that they touch upon one another, staining each other to the extent that our desire for any particular thing may be said to be our regret over its dissolution, and that the only true desire which might possess us in this life is the desire for things to have lasted– for life to have been otherwise. Thus, in every word we utter, in every teaching that warms our spirit, in all of our joys and sorrows, long have we been prepared for that renunciation of things in which all music offends us save for what the dawn’s gentle hand plays upon the harp of still waters; notre cœur eut goûté, dans une paix profonde, to speak with Rotrou, in which all beauty strikes us as quite false save for what the heart can drink in profound silence.
Our longings draw out our life while our joy concentrates it, forcing it to withdraw into its own heart, so that this rhythm, ceaselessly repeated over the course of the years, does not so much mature us, does not so much assist us in growing old, so much as it spares us the sensation of ever having lived, like that eternal labor of the rolling sea. In the end we have no memories, nor even any hopes. We have images, which alone survive the oblivion of time; inseparable from our very substance, the flesh of our very heart; indistinguishable from the scenes of life, yet partaking of the nature of dreams. As Amiel said, “Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship.” The endless abbreviation and cutting-short of everything in the visible world of nature extends even into the life of the very soul. Of life we may gather only some nascent and incomplete visions, which with some idea we must lend our support to; that idea in whose image we feel we have discovered the hidden sympathy of one state of the soul to another. Perhaps beauty is nothing more than that.
What does this sympathy teach us? Though it is true that hope perpetuates our pain, hope is less painful than life. All of our suffering owes itself to a single fact. We are afraid to hope. Let us speak with that epigram in Scaevolae Sammarthani Poemata: ne pareant animi sensa, tacera potes, the world is divided between feelings and silence. Our sojourn through this life is spent in traversing from the former to the later point, from the later to the former, yet we carry within us an infinite which with all of our cunning we can never accomplish in burying under the finite, as Carlyle said, even if it is our greatest desire to do so; a hunger which with all the beauty of illusion we cannot satiate and resolve in silence; a hope which will not balk at the world in reticent contemplation, but clamors in its own suffering to taste existence. We aim to forget it and to abandon it if possible.
An old poet, Sascerides, said that love makes us immortal. What is love, but the courage to hope? What is hope, but the furious hunger for being, which the poet Saint-Amant formulated with his words, “I welcome blood in both war and love,” a hunger encircled and drawn into its own heart, into that within us which we have not yet succeeded in relinquishing to the world. In this hope it is humanity, only humanity, that serves the measure of man, not what was expected of him, nor what was within the power of his mere flesh to grasp. We have looked to God, to nature, to history; we have sought to measure man by every criteria except for human nature. We do not perish because we are the sons of time, but because we are the sons of a man.
