A few courageous men have halted before this mountain and undertaken to lift it. Let us leave them toiling in the shadow; let us aid them, if not by our effort, at least by our silence, and wait.
Let us wait, but let us not cease to go forth to other battles. The unknown never fails us. And as for what we shall choose, there is so much in the unknown to allure us, to enchant us! If we give up surmounting one obstacle another will always rise before our feet. From obstacle to obstacle we shall always be led to the foot of the same wall. We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.
Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock, a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with bitterness. Happily, the unknown is always there.
I find myself alone with the person who of all the world is the closest to me, the best loved, the most perfectly chosen. The silence exhales a light perfume, a unique perfume that seems that of our kindred souls. Oh! how we should like to believe that the essences of our beings, delivered at last, might communicate and unite with each other in the intermediate space, in the impassable abyss!
At this very moment we surprise in one another’s eyes a common thought. Simultaneously, it escapes our lips with a sort of rapturous precipitancy, as if we were afraid of not arriving at exactly the same moment at the rendez-vous, as if we wished, with the harmonious precision of a well-rehearsed duet, to confess together some matchless certainty.
We are happy, filled with astonishment.... But I am not deceived.
I do not yet hold it, palpitating, for good and all, between my fingers, the proof that has been so long sought for. Not yet, this day, have I met face to face either God or the immortal soul.
Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us, the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,—that it is one of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes, we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to make us vibrate in harmony.
But there must be the touch of the bow, there must be the perfume, so faint that one experiences its suggestions without being sure of its presence; perhaps there is necessary only one of those obscure phenomena which pass the limit of our senses in the twilight where our inadequate organs can only gropingly divine the world.
This is our meager certainty. Very well! Let us not reject it in our spite; for it has its depth, its beauty. We must make it our own, force it to enrich us.