Light

by Henri Barbusse

CHAPTER XVIII

EYES THAT SEE

Two days have passed. I get up, dress myself, and open my shutters.
It is Sunday, as you can see in the street.

I put on my clothes of former days. I catch myself paying spruce attention to my toilet, since it is Sunday, by reason of the compulsion one feels to do the same things again.

And now I see how much my face has hollowed, as I compare it with the one I had left behind in the familiar mirror.

I go out, and meet several people. Madame Piot asks me how many of the enemy I have killed. I reply that I killed one. Her tittle-tattle accosts another subject. I feel the enormous difference there was between what she asked me and what I answered.

The streets are clad in the mourning of closed shops. It is still the same empty and hermetically sealed face of the day of holiday. My eyes notice, near the sunken post, the old jam-pot, which has not moved.

I climb on to Chestnut Hill. No one is there, because it is Sunday. In that white winding-sheet, that widespread pallor of Sunday, all my former lot builds itself again, house by house.

I look outwards from the top of the hill. All is the same in the lines and the tones. The spectacle of yesterday and that of to-day are as identical as two picture postcards. I see my house—the roof, and three-quarters of the front. I feel a pleasant thrill. I feel that I love this corner of the earth, but especially my house.

What, is everything the same? Is there nothing new, nothing? Is the only changed thing the man that I am, walking too slowly in clothes too big, the man grown old and leaning on a stick?

The landscape is barren in the inextricable simplicity of the daylight. I do not know why I was expecting revelations. In vain my gaze wanders everywhere, to infinity.

But a darkening of storm fills and agitates the sky, and suddenly clothes the morning with a look of evening. The crowd which I see yonder along the avenue, under cover of the great twilight which goes by with its invisible harmony, profoundly draws my attention.

All those shadows which are shelling themselves out along the road are very tiny, they are separated from one another, they are of the same stature. From a distance one sees how much one man resembles another. And it is true that a man is like a man. The one is not of a different species from the other. It is a certainty which I am bringing forward—the only one; and the truth is simple, for what I believe I see with my eyes.

The equality of all these human spots that appear in the somber gleams of storm, why—it is a revelation! It is a beginning of distinct order in Chaos. How comes it that I have never seen what is so visible, how comes it that I never perceived that obvious thing—that a man and another man are the same thing, everywhere and always? I rejoice that I have seen it as if my destiny were to shed a little light on us and on our road.

* * * * * *

The bells are summoning our eyes to the church. It is surrounded by scaffolding, and a long swarm of people are gliding towards it, grouping round it, going in.

The earth and the sky—but I do not see God. I see everywhere, everywhere, God's absence. My gaze goes through space and returns, forsaken. And I have never seen Him, and He is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.

No one ever saw Him. I know—I always knew, for that matter!—that there is no proof of God's existence, and that you must find, first of all, believe in it if you want to prove it. Where does He show Himself? What does He save? What tortures of the heart, what disasters does He turn aside from all and each in the ruin of hearts? Where have we known or handled or embraced anything but His name? God's absence surrounds infinitely and even actually each kneeling suppliant, athirst for some humble personal miracle, and each seeker who bends over his papers as he watches for proofs like a creator; it surrounds the spiteful antagonism of all religions, armed against each other, enormous and bloody. God's absence rises like the sky over the agonizing conflicts between good and evil, over the trembling heedfulness of the upright, over the immensity—still haunting me—of the cemeteries of agony, the charnel heaps of innocent soldiers, the heavy cries of the shipwrecked. Absence! Absence! In the hundred thousand years that life has tried to delay death there has been nothing on earth more fruitless than man's cries to divinity, nothing which gives so perfect an idea of silence.

How does it come about that I have lasted till now without understanding that I did not see God? I believed because they had told me to believe. It seems to me that I am able to believe something no longer because they command me to, and I feel myself set free.

I lean on the stones of the low wall, at the spot where I leaned of old, in the time when I thought I was some one and knew something.

My looks fall on the families and the single figures which are hurrying towards the black hole of the church porch, towards the gloom of the nave, where one is enlaced in incense, where wheels of light and angels of color hover under the vaults which contain a little of the great emptiness of the heavens.

I seem to stoop nearer to those people, and I get glimpses of certain profundities among the fleeting pictures which my sight lends me. I seem to have stopped, at random, in front of the richness of a single being. I think of the "humble, quiet lives," and it appears to me within a few words, and that in what they call a "quiet, lowly life," there are immense expectations and waitings and weariness.

I understand why they want to believe in God, and consequently why they do believe in Him, since faith comes at will.

I remember, while I lean on this wall and listen, that one day in the past not far from here, a lowly woman raised her voice and said, "That woman does not believe in God! It's because she has no children, or else because they've never been ill."

And I remember, too, without being able to picture them to myself, all the voices I have heard saying, "It would be too unjust, if there were no God!"

There is no other proof of God's existence than the need we have of Him. God is not God—He is the name of all that we lack. He is our dream, carried to the sky. God is a prayer, He is not some one.

They put all His kind actions into the eternal future, they hide them in the unknown. Their agonizing dues they drown in distances which outdistance them; they cancel His contradictions in inaccessible uncertainty. No matter; they believe in the idol made of a word.

And I? I have awaked out of religion, since it was a dream. It had to be that one morning my eyes would end by opening and seeing nothing more of it.

I do not see God, but I see the church and I see the priests. Another ceremony is unfolding just now, in another direction—up at the castle, a Mass of St. Hubert. Leaning on my elbows the spectacle absorbs me.

These ministers of the cult, blessing this pack of hounds, these guns and hunting knives, officiating in lace and pomp side by side with these wealthy people got up as warlike sportsmen, women and men alike, on the great steps of a castle and facing a crowd kept aloof by ropes,—this spectacle defines, more glaringly than any words whatever can, the distance which separates the churches of to-day from Christ's teaching, and points to all the gilded putridity which has accumulated on those pure defaced beginnings. And what is here is everywhere; what is little is great.

The parsons, the powerful—all always joined together. Ah, certainty is rising to the heart of my conscience. Religions destroy themselves spiritually because they are many. They destroy whatever leans upon their fables. But their directors, they who are the strength of the idol, impose it. They decree authority; they hide the light. They are men, defending their interests as men; they are rulers defending their sway.

It has to be! You shall not know! A terrible memory shudders through me; and I catch a confused glimpse of people who, for the needs of their common cause, uphold, with their promises and thunder, the mad unhappiness which lies heavy on the multitudes.

* * * * * *

Footsteps are climbing towards me. Marie appears, dressed in gray. She comes to look for me. In the distance I saw that her cheeks were brightened and rejuvenated by the wind. Close by I see that her eyelids are worn, like silk. She finds me sunk in reflection. She looks at me, like a frail and frightened mother; and this solicitude which she brings me is enough by itself to calm and comfort me.

I point out to her the dressed-up commotion below us, and make some bitter remark on the folly of these people who vainly gather in the church, and go to pray there, to talk all alone. Some of them believe; and the rest say to them, "I do the same as you."

Marie does not argue the basis of religion. "Ah," she says, "I've never thought clearly about it, never. They've always spoken of God to me, and I've always believed in Him. But—I don't know. I only know one thing," she adds, her blue eyes looking at me, "and that is that there must be delusion. The people must have religion, so as to put up with the hardships of life, the sacrifices——"

She goes on again at once, more emphatically, "There must be religion for the unhappy, so that they won't give way. It may be foolishness, but if you take that away from them, what have they left?"

The gentle woman—the normal woman of settled habits—whom I had left here repeats, "There must be illusion." She sticks to this idea, she insists, she is taking the side of the unhappy. Perhaps she talks like that for her own sake, and perhaps only because she is compassionate for me.

I said in vain, "No—there must never be delusion, never fallacies. There should be no more lies. We shall not know then where we're going."

She persists and makes signs of dissent.

I say no more, tired. But I do not lower my gaze before the all-powerful surroundings of circumstance. My eyes are pitiless, and cannot help descrying the false God and the false priests everywhere.

We go down the footpath and return in silence. But it seems to me that the rule of evil is hidden in easy security among the illusions which they heap up over us. I am nothing; I am no more than I was before, but I am applying my hunger for the truth. I tell myself again that there is no supernatural power, that nothing has fallen from the sky; that everything is within us and in our hands. And in the inspiration of that faith my eyes embrace the magnificence of the empty sky, the abounding desert of the earth, the Paradise of the Possible.

We pass along the base of the church. Marie says to me—as if nothing had just been said, "Look how the poor church was damaged by a bomb from an aeroplane—all one side of the steeple gone. The good old vicar was quite ill about it. As soon as he got up he did nothing else but try to raise money to have his dear steeple built up again; and he got it."

People are revolving round the building and measuring its yawning mutilation with their eyes. My thoughts turn to all these passers-by and to all those who will pass by, whom I shall not see, and to other wounded steeples. The most beautiful of all voices echoes within me, and I would fain make use of it for this entreaty, "Build not the churches again! You who will come after us, you who, in the sharp distinctness of the ended deluge will perhaps be able to see the order of things more clearly, don't build the churches again! They did not contain what we used to believe, and for centuries they have only been the prisons of the saviours, and monumental lies. If you are still of the faith have your temples within yourselves. But if you again bring stones to build up a narrow and evil tradition, that is the end of all. In the name of justice, in the name of light, in the name of pity, do not build the churches again!"

But I did not say anything. I bow my head and walk more heavily.

I see Madame Marcassin coming out of the church with blinking eyes, weary-looking, a widow indeed. I bow and approach her and talk to her a little, humbly, about her husband, since I was under his orders and saw him die. She listens to me in dejected inattention. She is elsewhere. She says to me at last, "I had a memorial service since it's usual." Then she maintains a silence which means "There's nothing to be said, just as there's nothing to be done." In face of that emptiness I understand the crime that Marcassin committed in letting himself be killed for nothing but the glory of dying.

* * * * * *