LITERATURE IN OUR TIME
of believing in man but of wanting to. Everything conspired to
dis–
courage them: so many indications everywhere about them, those
faces bent over them, that misery within them. Everything concurred
in making them believe that they were only insects, that man is the
impossible dream of sneaks and squealers, and that they would
awaken as vermin like everybody else.
This man had to be invented with their martyrized flesh, with
their hunted thoughts which were already betraying them-invented
on the basis of nothing, for nothing, in absolute gratuity. For it is
within the human that one can distinguish means and ends, values
and preferences, but they were still at the creation of the world and
they had only to decide in sovereign fashion whether there would be
anything more than the reign of the animal within it. They remained
silent; man was born of this silence. We knew that every moment,
all over Paris, man was a hundred times destroyed and reaffirmed.
Obsessed as we were by these tortures, a week did not go by
that we did not ask ourselves: "Suppose I were tortured, what would
I do?" And this question alone carried us to the very frontiers of
ourselves and of the human. We oscillated between the no man's
land where mankind denies itself, and the barren desert from which
it surges and creates itself. Those who had immediately preceded us
in the world, who had bequeathed us their culture, their wisdom,
their customs, and their proverbs, who had built the houses that
we lived in and who had marked the routes with the statues of their
great men, practiced modest virtues and remained in the moderate
regions. Their faults never caused them to fall so low that they did not
find others beneath them who were more guilty, nor did their merits
cause them to rise so high that they did not see other souls above
them whose merit was greater. Their gaze encountered men farther
than the eye can reach. The very sayings they made use of and
which we had learned from them-"a fool ·always
finds
a bigger
fool to admire him," "we always need someone smaller than our–
selves"-their very manner of consoling themselves in affliction by
telling themselves, whatever their unhappiness was, that there were
others worse off, all goes to show that they considered mankind as
a natural and infinite milieu that one could never leave and whose
limits could not be touched. They died with a good conscience and
without ever having explored their condition.
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