Jean-Christophe, vol 1, Romain Rolland [book club recommendations .txt] 📗

the moment.

Christophe was no longer Christophe. He did not know himself. He was in a

mighty travail that was like to sweep everything away, a complete upheaval.

 

*

 

Christophe was conscious of extreme weariness and great uneasiness. He was

for no reason worn out; his head was heavy, his eyes, his ears, all his

senses were dumb and throbbing. He could not give his attention to

anything. His mind leaped from one subject to another, and was in a fever

that sucked him dry. The perpetual fluttering of images in his mind made

him giddy. At first he attributed it to fatigue and the enervation of the

first days of spring. But spring passed and his sickness only grew worse.

 

It was what the poets who only touch lightly on things call the unease of

adolescence, the trouble of the cherubim, the waking of the desire of love

in the young body and soul. As if the fearful crisis of all a man’s being,

breaking up, dying, and coming to full rebirth, as if the cataclysm in

which everything, faith, thought, action, all life, seems like to be

blotted out, and then to be new-forged in the convulsions of sorrow and

joy, can be reduced to terms of a child’s folly!

 

All his body and soul were in a ferment. He watched them, having no

strength to struggle, with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. He did not

understand what was happening in himself. His whole being was

disintegrated. He spent days together in absolute torpor. Work was torture

to him. At night he slept heavily and in snatches, dreaming monstrously,

with gusts of desire; the soul of a beast was racing madly in him. Burning,

bathed in sweat, he watched himself in horror; he tried to break free of

the crazy and unclean thoughts that possessed him, and he wondered if he

were going mad.

 

The day gave him no shelter from his brutish thoughts. In the depths of his

soul he felt that he was slipping down and down; there was no stay to

clutch at; no barrier to keep back chaos. All his defenses, all his

citadels, with the quadruple rampart that hemmed him in so proudly—his

God, his art, his pride, his moral faith, all was crumbling away, falling

piece by piece from him. He saw himself naked, bound, lying unable to move,

like a corpse on which vermin swarm. He had spasms of revolt: where was his

will, of which he was so proud? He called to it in vain: it was like the

efforts that one makes in sleep, knowing that one is dreaming, and trying

to awake. Then one succeeds only in falling from one dream to another like

a lump of lead, and in being more and more choked by the suffocation of the

soul in bondage. At last he found that it was less painful not to struggle.

He decided not to do so, with, fatalistic apathy and despair.

 

The even tenor of his life seemed to be broken up. Now he slipped down a

subterranean crevasse and was like to disappear; now he bounded up again

with a violent jerk. The chain of his days was snapped. In the midst of the

even plain of the hours great gaping holes would open to engulf his soul.

Christophe looked on at the spectacle as though it did not concern him.

Everything, everybody,—and himself—were strange to him. He went about his

business, did his work, automatically: it seemed to him that the machinery

of his life might stop at any moment: the wheels were out of gear. At

dinner with his mother and the others, in the orchestra with the musicians

and the audience, suddenly there would be a void and emptiness in his

brain; he would look stupidly at the grinning faces about him; and he could

not understand. He would ask himself:

 

“What is there between these creatures and …?”

 

He dared not even say:

 

“… and me.”

 

For he knew not whether he existed. He would speak and his voice would seem

to issue from another body. He would move, and he saw his movements from

afar, from above—from the top of a tower. He would pass his hand over his

face, and his eyes would wander. He was often near doing crazy things.

 

It was especially when he was most in public that he had to keep guard on

himself. For example, on the evenings when he went to the Palace or was

playing in public. Then he would suddenly be seized by a terrific desire to

make a face, or say something outrageous, to pull the Grand Duke’s nose, or

to take a running kick at one of the ladies. One whole evening while he was

conducting the orchestra, he struggled against an insensate desire to

undress himself in public; and he was haunted by the idea from the moment

when he tried to check it; he had to exert all his strength not to give way

to it. When he issued from the brute struggle he was dripping with sweat

and his mind was blank. He was really mad. It was enough for him to think

that he must not do a thing for it to fasten on him with the maddening

tenacity of a fixed idea.

 

So his life was spent in a series of unbridled outbreaks and of endless

falls into emptiness. A furious wind in the desert. Whence came this wind?

From what abyss came these desires that wrenched his body and mind? He was

like a bow stretched to breaking point by a strong hand,—to what end

unknown?—which then springs back like a piece of dead wood. Of what force

was he the prey? He dared not probe for it. He felt that he was beaten,

humiliated, and he would not face his defeat. He was weary and broken in

spirit. He understood now the people whom formerly he had despised: those

who will not seek awkward truth. In the empty hours, when he remembered

that time was passing, his work neglected, the future lost, he was frozen

with terror. But there was no reaction: and his cowardice found excuses in

desperate affirmation of the void in which he lived: he took a bitter

delight in abandoning himself to it like a wreck on the waters. What was

the good of fighting? There was nothing beautiful, nor good; neither God,

nor life, nor being of any sort. In the street as he walked, suddenly the

earth would sink away from him: there was neither ground, nor air, nor

light, nor himself: there was nothing. He would fall, his head would drag

him down, face forwards: he could hardly hold himself up; he was on the

point of collapse. He thought he was going to die, suddenly, struck down.

He thought he was dead….

 

Christophe was growing a new skin. Christophe was growing a new soul. And

seeing the worn out and rotten soul of his childhood falling away he never

dreamed that he was taking on a new one, young and stronger. As through

life we change our bodies, so also do we change our souls: and the

metamorphosis does not always take place slowly over many days; there are

times of crisis when the whole is suddenly renewed. The adult changes his

soul. The old soul that is cast off dies. In those hours of anguish we

think that all is at an end. And the whole thing begins again. A life dies.

Another life has already come into being.

 

One night he was alone in his room, with his elbow on his desk under the

light of a candle. His back was turned to the window. He was not working.

He had not been able to work for weeks. Everything was twisting and turning

in his head. He had brought everything under scrutiny at once: religion,

morals, art, the whole of life. And in the general dissolution of his

thoughts was no method, no order: he had plunged into the reading of books

taken haphazard from his grandfather’s heterogeneous library or from

Vogel’s collection of books: books of theology, science, philosophy, an odd

lot, of which he understood nothing, having everything to learn: he could

not finish any of them, and in the middle of them went off on divagations,

endless whimsies, which left him weary, empty, and in mortal sorrow.

 

So, that evening, he was sunk in an exhausted torpor. The whole house was

asleep. His window was open. Not a breath came up from the yard. Thick

clouds filled the sky. Christophe mechanically watched the candle burn away

at the bottom of the candlestick. He could not go to bed. He had no thought

of anything. He felt the void growing, growing from moment to moment. He

tried not to see the abyss that drew him to its brink: and in spite of

himself he leaned over and his eyes gazed into the depths of the night. In

the void, chaos was stirring, and faint sounds came from the darkness.

Agony filled him: a shiver ran down his spine: his skin tingled: he

clutched the table so as not to fall. Convulsively he awaited nameless

things, a miracle, a God….

 

Suddenly, like an opened sluice, in the yard behind him, a deluge of water,

a heavy rain, large drops, down pouring, fell. The still air quivered. The

dry, hard soil rang out like a bell. And the vast scent of the earth,

burning, warm as that of an animal, the smell of the flowers, fruit, and

amorous flesh rose in a spasm of fury and pleasure. Christophe, under

illusion, at fullest stretch, shook. He trembled…. The veil was rent. He

was blinded. By a flash of lightning, he saw, in the depths of the night,

he saw—he was God. God was in himself; He burst the ceiling of the room,

the walls of the house; He cracked the very bounds of existence. He filled

the sky, the universe, space. The world coursed through Him, like a

cataract. In the horror and ecstasy of that cataclysm, Christophe fell too,

swept along by the whirlwind which brushed away and crushed like straws the

laws of nature. He was breathless: he was drunk with the swift hurtling

down into God … God-abyss! God-gulf! Fire of Being! Hurricane of life!

Madness of living,—aimless, uncontrolled, beyond reason,—for the fury of

living!

 

*

 

When the crisis was over, he fell into a deep sleep and slept as he had not

done for long enough. Next day when he awoke his head swam: he was as

broken as though he had been drunk. But in his inmost heart he had still a

beam of that somber and great light that had struck him down the night

before. He tried to relight it. In vain. The more he pursued it, the more

it eluded him. From that time on, all his energy was directed towards

recalling the vision of a moment. The endeavor was futile. Ecstasy does not

answer the bidding of the will.

 

But that mystic exaltation was not the only experience that he had of it:

it recurred several times, but never with the intensity of the first. It

came always at moments when Christophe was least expecting it, for a second

only, a time so short, so sudden,—no longer than a wink of an eye or a

raising of a hand—that the vision was gone before he could discover that

it was: and then he would wonder whether he had not dreamed it. After that

fiery bolt that had set the night aflame, it was a gleaming dust, shedding

fleeting sparks, which the eye could hardly see as they sped by.