The Immoralist/Part 1, 6

I shall not speak of every stage of the journey. Some of them have left me only a confused recollection; I was sometimes better and sometimes worse in health, still at the mercy of a cold wind and made anxious by the shadow of a cloud; the condition of my nerves too was the cause of frequent trouble; but my lungs at any rate were recovering. Each relapse was shorter and less serious; the attacks were as sharp, but my body was better armed against them.

From Tunis we went to Malta, and from there to Syracuse; I found myself back again on the classic ground whose language and history were known to me. Since the beginning of my illness I had lived without question or rule, simply applying myself to the act of living as an animal does or a child. Now that I was less absorbed by my malady, my life became once more certain of itself and conscious. After ​that long and almost mortal sickness, I had thought I should rise again the same as before and be able without difficulty to reknit my present to my past; in the newness of a strange country it had been possible to deceive myself—but not here; everything brought home to me—though I still thought it astonishing—that I was changed.

When at Syracuse and later, I wanted to start my work again and immerse myself once more in a minute study of the past, I discovered that something had, if not destroyed, at any rate modified my pleasure in it … and this something was the feeling of the present. The history of the past had now taken on for me the immobility, the terrifying fixity of the nocturnal shadows in the little courtyard of Biskra—the immobility of death. In old days, I had taken pleasure in this very fixity which enabled my mind to work with precision; the facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a museum, or rather like plants in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive in the sun. Now-a-days, if I still took any pleasure in history, it was by imagining it in the present. Thus the great political events of the past moved me less than the feeling that began ​to revive in me for the poets or for a few men of action. At Syracuse, I reread Theocritus and reflected that his goatherds with the beautiful names were the very same as those I had loved at Biskra.

My erudition, which was aroused at every step, became an encumbrance and hampered my joy. I could not see a Greek theatre or temple without immediately reconstructing it in my mind. Every thought of the festivals of antiquity made me grieve over the death of the ruin that was left standing in their place; and I had a horror of death.

I ended by avoiding ruins; the noblest monuments of the past were less to me than those sunk gardens of the Latomie whose lemons have the sharp sweetness of oranges—or the shores of the Cyane, still flowing among the papyri as blue as on the day when it wept for Proserpine.

I ended by despising the learning that had at first been my pride; the studies, which up till then had been my whole life, now seemed to me to have a mere accidental and conventional connection with myself. I found out that I was something different and—O rapture!—that I had a separate existence of my own. Inasmuch as I was a specialist, I appeared to myself senseless; inasmuch as I was a man, did I ​know myself at all? I had only just been born and could not as yet know what I had been born. It was that I had to find out.

There is nothing more tragic for a man who has been expecting to die than a long convalescence. After that touch from the wing of Death, what seemed important is so no longer; other things become so which had at first seemed unimportant, or which one did not even know existed. The miscellaneous mass of acquired knowledge of every kind that has overlain the mind gets peeled off in places like a mask of paint, exposing the bare skin—the very flesh of the authentic creature that had lain hidden beneath it.

He it was whom I thenceforward set out to discover—that authentic creature, 'the old Adam,' whom the Gospel had repudiated, whom everything about me—books, masters, parents, and I myself had begun by attempting to suppress. And he was already coming into view, still in the rough and difficult of discovery, thanks to all that overlay him, but so much the more worthy to be discovered, so much the more valorous. Thenceforward I despised the secondary creature, the creature who was due to teaching, whom education had painted on the surface. These overlays had to be shaken off.

​And I compared myself to a palimpsest; I tasted the scholar's joy when he discovers under more recent writing, and on the same paper, a very ancient and infinitely more precious text. What was this occult text? In order to read it, was it not first of all necessary to efface the more recent one?

I was besides no longer the sickly, studious being to whom my early morality, with all its rigidity and restrictions, had been suited. There was more here than a convalescence; there was an increase, a recrudescence of life, the influx of a richer, warmer blood which must of necessity affect my thoughts, touch them one by one, inform them all, stir and colour the most remote, delicate and secret fibres of my being. For, either to strength or to weakness, the creature adapts itself; it constitutes itself according to the powers it possesses; but if these should increase, if they should permit a wider scope, then … I did not think all this at the time, and my description gives a false idea of me. In reality, I did not think at all; I never questioned myself; a happy fatalism guided me. I was afraid that too hasty an investigation might disturb the mystery of my slow transformation. I must allow time for the effaced characters to reappear, and not attempt to re-form ​them. Not so much neglecting my mind therefore, as allowing it to lie fallow, I gave myself up to the luxurious enjoyment of my own self, of external things, of all existence, which seemed to me divine. We had left Syracuse, and as I ran along the precipitous road that connects Taormina with Mola, I remember shouting aloud, as if my calling could bring him to me: "A new self! A new self!"

My only effort then—an effort which was at that time constant—consisted in systematically contemning and suppressing everything which I believed I owed to my past education and early moral beliefs. Deliberately disdainful of my learning, and in scorn of my scholar's tastes, I refused to visit Agrigentum, and a few days later, on the road to Naples, I passed by the beautiful temple of Pæstum, in which Greece still breathes, and where, two years later, I went to worship some God or other—I no longer know which.

Why do I say 'my only effort'? How could I be interested in myself save as a perfectible being? Never before had my will been so tensely strung as in striving after this unknown and vaguely imagined perfection. I employed the whole of my will indeed, in strengthening and bronzing my body. We had left the coast near Salerno and reached Ravello. There, ​a keener air, the charm of the rocks, their recesses, their surprises, the unexplored depths of the valleys, all contributed to my strength and enjoyment and gave impetus to my enthusiasm.

Not far from the shore and very near the sky, Ravello lies on an abrupt height facing the flat and distant coast of Pæstum. Under the Norman domination, it was a city of no inconsiderable importance; it is nothing now but a narrow village where I think we were the only strangers. We were lodged in an ancient religious house which had been turned into a hotel; it is situated on the extreme edge of the rock, and its terraces and gardens seemed to hang suspended over an abyss of azure. Over the wall, festooned with creeping vine, one could at first see nothing but the sea; one had to go right up to the wall in order to discover the steep cultivated slope that connects Ravello with the shore by paths that seem more like staircases. Above Ravello, the mountain continues. First come enormous olive and caroub trees, with cyclamen growing in their shadow; then, higher up, Spanish chestnuts in great quantities, cool air, northern plants; lower down lemon trees near the sea. These are planted in small plots owing to the slope of the ground; they are step gardens, nearly all ​alike; a narrow path goes from end to end through the middle of each; one enters noiselessly, like a thief; one dreams in their green shadow; their foliage is thick and heavy; no direct ray of sunlight penetrates it; the lemons, like drops of opaque wax, hang perfumed; they are white and greenish in the shade; they are within reach of one's hand, of one's thirst; they are sweet and sharp and refreshing.

The shade was so dense beneath them that I did not dare linger in it after my walk, for exercise still made me perspire. And yet I now managed the steps without being exhausted; I practised climbing them with my mouth shut; I put greater and greater intervals between my halts; "I will go so far without giving in," I used to say to myself; then, the goal reached, I was rewarded by a glow of satisfied pride; I would take a few long deep breaths, and feel as if the air entered my lungs more thoroughly, more efficaciously. I brought all my old assiduity to bear on the care of my body. I began to progress.

I was sometimes astonished that my health came back so quickly. I began to think I had exaggerated the gravity of my condition—to doubt that I had been very ill—to laugh at my blood-spitting—to regret that my recovery had not been more arduous.

​In my ignorance of my physical needs, my treatment of myself had at first been very foolish. I now made a patient study of them and came to regard my ingenious exercise of prudence and care as a kind of game. What I still suffered from most was my morbid sensitiveness to the slightest change of temperature. Now that my lungs were cured, I attributed this hyperaesthesia to the nervous debility left me by my illness and I determined to conquer it. The sight of the beautiful, brown, sunburnt skins which some of the carelessly clad peasants at work in the fields showed beneath their open shirts, made me long to be like them. One morning, after I had stripped, I looked at myself; my thin arms, my stooping shoulders, which no effort of mine could keep straight, but above all the whiteness of my skin, or rather its entire want of colour, shamed me to tears. I dressed quickly and, instead of going down to Amalfi as usual, I turned my steps towards some mossy, grass-grown rocks, in a place far from any habitation, far from any road, where I knew no-one could see me. When I got there, I undressed slowly. The air was almost sharp, but the sun was burning. I exposed my whole body to its flame. I sat down, lay down, turned myself about. I felt the ground ​hard beneath me; the waving grass brushed me. Though I was sheltered from the wind, I shivered and thrilled at every breath. Soon a delicious burning enveloped me; my whole being surged up into my skin.

We stayed at Ravello a fortnight; every morning I returned to the same rocks and went on with my cure. I soon found I was wearing a troublesome and unnecessary amount of clothing; my skin, having recovered its tone, the constant perspiration ceased and I was able to keep warm without superfluous protection.

On one of the last mornings (we were in the middle of April), I was bolder still. In a hollow of the rocks I have mentioned, there flowed a spring of transparent water. At this very place it fell in a little cascade—not a very abundant one to be sure, but the fall had hollowed out a deeper basin at its foot in which the water lingered, exquisitely pure and clear. Three times already I had been there, leant over it, stretched myself along its bank, thirsty and longing; I had gazed at the bottom of polished rock, where not a stain, not a weed was to be seen, and where the sun shot its dancing and iridescent rays. On this fourth day, I came to the spot with my mind ​already made up. The water looked as bright and as clear as ever, and without pausing to think, I plunged straight in. It struck an instant chill through me and I jumped out again quickly and flung myself down on the grass in the sun. There was some wild thyme growing near by; I picked some of the sweet-smelling leaves, crushed them in my hands and rubbed my wet but burning body with them. I looked at myself for a long while—with no more shame now—with joy. Although not yet robust. I felt myself capable of becoming so—harmonious, sensuous, almost beautiful.