IX
There is another refuge!
“What makes hope so intense a pleasure,” writes M. Bergson, “is that the future, which we fashion to suit ourselves, appears to us at one and the same time under a multitude of forms, all equally smiling, equally possible. Even if the most desirable of them all is realized, we must have sacrificed the others, and we shall have lost much. The idea of the future, pregnant with infinite possibilities, is therefore more fertile than the future itself, and that is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in reverie than in reality.”
The idea of the future alone interests us: that alone is our treasure, that alone is endowed with existence. It is that indeed which we call the future. And if M. Bergson, at the end of these admirable lines, creates a distinction between the future and the idea of the future, he does not make us forget that he has just, and as if by design, caused the confusion; for what “we fashion to suit ourselves” is the idea of the future, and nothing else. But, following the example of M. Bergson, let us call our idea of the future the future itself.
This idea is our cherished fortune. Certainly we take a passionate interest in seeking, in what flows out of the present, something that resembles the realization of our dreams. And yet their realization, like their failure, marks, in every sense, their end, their exhaustion. And that is insupportable to us. Whatever fate the present reserves for our imaginings, we labor every day, as fast as time devours them and destroys them by making them finite, to push them further back into the infinite, to prolong them, to reconstruct them, so that we may never have less of a future at our disposal.
This need of a future, which has no other connection than our hope with the rugged actuality of the present, is so deep-rooted, so generally human a thing, that one cannot contemplate it without a respect which is almost religious. In order that this future, so pregnant with dreams, should be as necessary as it is to the moral life of most men, it must represent a truly incomparable treasure. The embrace we throw around it is the close and powerful embrace we reserve for those possessions that lie nearest our hearts. And, since we have already detached the word “possession” from the gross meaning that is usually attributed to it, let us say that the possession of a dream, when it assures our happiness, is a reality less debatable and less illusory than the possession of a coal-mine or a field of wheat.
But as there is no possession without conquest, without effort, we must merit our dreams and cultivate them lovingly.
If people who have taken the mould of reason reproach us with distracting for a moment the men of that practical reality which pretends to be preparing the future, we are ready to reply to them:
“Glance at those men to whom our words are addressed. You know that they are crushed with fatigue and privation. They have experienced every danger and every sort of weariness. By what right will you hinder them from taking refuge in a world which is henceforth the least contestable of their domains? Do not, on their account, be afraid of reverie; it could never fill them with as much bitterness as does this modern reality of which you are the unpunished builders.
“If you are not weary of glimpsing your future through the specifications, the account-books, the cage-bars, and the unbreathable fumes of industrialism, at least allow these to cherish a marvelous and, in spite of all its disappointments, an efficacious future. It is not a question of forgetting life,—that is too beautiful and too desirable, but rather of amplifying and fertilizing it. Whatever may be the outcome of a generous dream, it always ennobles the man who has entertained it. Allow the unhappy to be rich in a possession that costs them only love and simple faith. Do not let your reason dispossess them of the only treasure that your greed has not been able to snatch from them. It is the cult of the future and of memory that sustains man in the uncertainty of the present hour. If he walks by instinct towards these refuges, do not turn him aside, and think, O priests of reason, of the warning of Pascal: ‘It is on the knowledge of the heart and of the instincts that Reason has to lean, and establish there the whole of her discourse’.”