I remember seeing hills that had been disemboweled by a bombardment and were sown with long splinters of twisted iron; the base of a monstrous shell appeared before me, one day, under these conditions, and it seemed to me truly inhuman, this product of the work of men: the noble metal, with which so many good and beautiful things can be made, took on a hateful appearance. Man had achieved the mournful miracle of denaturing nature, rendering it ignoble and criminal.
Truly, we are equally guilty every time we turn an object aside from its mission, which is altogether one of happiness. We are guilty again every time we fail to extract, for others and for ourselves, all the happiness an object holds in store and only asks to be allowed to yield.
II
It is because every fragment of the earth is a source of happiness that men ceaselessly dream of winning that source for their own profit.
They do not wish to have all humanity refresh itself, plunge its feverish face and lips in the cool waters.
Once the springs were the delight and the wealth of whole peoples; they were conducted magnificently along majestically proportioned aqueducts; their liquid opulence, crossing valleys and mountains, entered the cities with a great outburst of architectural joy; it shone and sparkled in the sunlight from a thousand embellished apertures before it went to bathe and nourish the people.
The statues of the gods watched over this treasure.
Today, the most beautiful springs are guarded by railings; one goes to a wicket and pays in order to drink there.
In the same way, all the springs of joy seem to have been sequestered for the profit of a few people.
This is not always for the sake of gain. In most cases it is simply for exclusiveness. The man who owns something capable of giving joy naïvely imagines that he will be happier if he is the only one to drink from this inexhaustible breast. He becomes infatuated with it and thinks of nothing but how to shut up his treasure. He puts up a wall and provides it with fragments of sharp glass, so that the wall may show its teeth, so that it may be not only defensive but, in some sense, offensive. At times, yawning with ennui in the very midst of his material prosperity, he makes an opening in the wall, only to correct this imprudence with a ditch; and from behind this he seems to say, “Now see how rich I am; look and proclaim it in a loud voice, you who pass by, for I am beginning not to be so sure of it myself.”