While we are eating, I feel that the boat has stopped. Through its body, and through my own, there is freer breathing. The pilot is disembarking. Under the electric light on his dancing canoe, he salutes us with a wave of the hand. They cast off the ladder, and we depart. We depart in the light of the moon!
And I see the curved line of the horizon before me, like the frontier of immeasurable slumber. All my heart despairs, with the thick sob one utters falling asleep, as the shore recedes behind us and fades out of sight. Ah, Sea, it is thou! I re-enter. There is no bosom so sweet as Eternity, and no security comparable to uncircumscribed Space. Our news hereafter will be that each evening will bring us the moon, rising on our left. I am delivered from change and from diversity. Here there are no vicissitudes but those of day and night; no solicitation but the sky’s before our eyes, and no repose but the bosom of these great waters which reflect it.
Cleansing purity! Here we may be absolved in the Absolute. What matter now the fermentation of people, the intrigues of marriages and wars, the operation of gold and of economic forces, and all the confused scheme of things below? Everything is simplified to the immediate act, according to the multifold passion of men and of things. Here I possess the central rhythm in its essence: the alternating rising and setting of the sun, and a simple fact; the appearance of the constellations on the horizon at an appointed hour.
And all day long I study the sea as one studies the eyes of a woman who understands. I follow its reflection with the attentiveness of one who listens. In comparison with this pure mirror, how fare the gross intricacies of your tragedies and your ostentations?
1900-1905
THE LAMP AND THE BELL
Of this sense of expectation through all the universe (and of my regret still to be alive) one is the sign and the other the expression. One is Duration itself, and the other—suddenly sonorous—marks a moment. One measures silence, the other probes obscurity. One solicits me and the other fascinates me. Oh sentinel, oh bitter patience,—double vigilance! While one flames, the other apportions.
The night takes away our witnesses, we no longer know where we are. Lines and tints, our personal arrangement of the world all around us (whose center we carry about with us, according to the angle from which our eye gazes at the moment), these are no longer present to show us our position. We are reduced to ourselves. Our vision has no longer the visible for limit, but the invisible for its cell. Homogeneous, close, impassive, compact, in the bosom of this obscurity the lamp is clear and definite. It appears full of life, it contains its own oil. By virtue of its flame it is able to drink itself. It attests that of which all the abyss is the absence. As it has taken a sufficient supply in the evening, it will last until rosy light is in the sky, until the dispersing of vapors like the fumes of new wine. It has a golden provision to last till dawn. As for me, let me not die in the night! Let me endure until the day! Let me not be extinguished except in light!
But if the night closes our eyes, it is in order that we may listen the more. Not only with the ears, but with the hearing of our soul—breathing as fishes do. Something accumulates, in the darkness: a number that must be sounded. I hear the bell, like the necessity for speech, like our inner silence summarized, like the Word speaking in secret. During the day we hear a whirlpool of ceaseless words weaving through the activities of human beings. The night extinguishes them, and only the measuring of Time remains. (I see, I listen). What does this clock apportion? What is measured? What strikes? What is Time? Here, to betray it, is the artifice of hourglass and clepsydra; the snare of a clock forces the hour to declare itself. I see it; the duration of time is reported to me; I am ruled by this march of time and of all the hours. I have my escape, I contain the creative pulse; outside of me the blow which suddenly resounds declares all the hidden effort of my heart, the motor and the worker in my body.
Just as the navigator follows the coast of a continent, verifying all the lights one after another; so, midway between horizons, the astronomer standing on the moving earth, like a mariner on his bridge, calculates the exact hour with his eyes on the most complete sextant of all. The enormous scheme of things, the innumerable universe is reduced to the establishing of these proportions, to the elaboration of these distances! There is no trembling of the stars that does not influence our emotions, no design woven by the harmony of the planets in which we may not be involved. There is no star revealed by the microscope on the photographic plate to which I may be indifferent. The hour strikes, and by its act the immense sky seems to lighten. Between the pendulum buried in the heart of a sick-room and the flaming angel which successively reaches in the sky all the points prescribed by its circular flight, there is an exact response. I shall not compute another hour; I shall not face it with less decision for all that.