Let us note again, in passing, the strange freakishness of these premonitions. They accumulate the most precise and circumstantial details as long as the scene remains insignificant, but come to a sudden stop before the one tragic and interesting scene of the drama: the duel and its issue. We here once more recognize the inconsistent, impotent, ironical or humorous habits of our unknown guest.
30
But we will not prolong these somewhat vain speculations concerning space and time. We are merely playing with words that represent very badly ideas which we do not put into form at all. To sum up, while it is difficult for us to conceive that the future preexists, perhaps it is even more difficult for us to understand that it does not exist; moreover, a certain number of facts tend to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in time and in eternity, the same permanence and the same vividness as the past. Now, from the moment that it preexists, it is not surprising that we should be able to know it; it is even astonishing, granted that it overhangs us on every side, that we should not discover it oftener and more easily. It remains to be learnt what would become of our life if everything were foreseen in it, if we saw it unfolding beforehand, in its entirety, with its events which would have to be inevitable, because, if it were possible for us to avoid them, they would not exist and we could not perceive them. Suppose that, instead of being abnormal, uncertain, obscure, debatable and very unusual, prediction became, so to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and infallible: in a short time, having nothing more to foretell, it would die of inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to me that I must die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally abandon the journey; therefore it could not have been predicted to me; and thus all life would soon be nothing but inaction, pause and abstention, a sort of vast desert where the embryos of still-born events would be gathered in heaps and where nothing would grow save perhaps one or two more or less fortunate enterprises and the little insignificant incidents which no one would trouble to avoid. But these again are questions to which there is no solution; and we will not pursue them further.
IX
HEROISM
1
One of the consoling surprises of the war is the unlooked-for and, so to speak, universal heroism which it has revealed among all the nations taking part in it.