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Delivered from romanticism, the nineteenth century toward its close and the twentieth century at its beginning, exalted an image full of the pride of physical life, of impetuous health.
Never had humanity seemed more intoxicated with its carnal development, with its splendid animality, than at the very moment when the war broke out. Our humanity! behold it now, covered with wounds so deep that for long decades the sight of them will baffle us and fill our pity with despair.
Behold it now, like a vast race of invalids. It creeps over a world where now there are more graveyards than villages.
We have had an unparalleled experience of sorrow and renunciation.
And yet the desire for happiness is deeply rooted: the unanimous voice to which our world listens repeats, from amid the sobs: “We shall renounce nothing!”
To him who listens with an attentive ear, it says again, it says particularly: “We shall renounce nothing, not even renunciation!”
But let us leave this immense grief to itself. Let us leave it to satiate and appease itself with its own contemplation—Silence!