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P:A.RTISAN REVIEW
if a country is to pass unscathed through these terrible times-is to
contrive that a sufficient number of persons in it shall be thoroughly
aware of the degree to which these ideas (let us call them such),
all
these ideas about which there is all this talk and fighting and
arguing and slaughter, are grotesquely confused and superlatively
vague. One of the greatest misfortunes of our time is the acute
disparity between the importance which all these questions have
at present and the crudeness and confusion of the concepts which
they represent.
Few people at this hour-and I refer to the time before the
breaking out of this most grim war, which is coming to birth so
strangely, as if it did not want to be born-few, I say, these days
still enjoy that tranquillity which permits one to choose the truth,
to abstract oneself in reflection. Almost all the world is in tumult,
is beside itself, and when man is beside himself he loses his most
essential attribute: the possibility of meditating, or withdrawing
into himself to come to terms with himself and define what it
is
that he believes and what it is that he does not believe; what he
truly esteems and what he truly detests. Being beside himself be–
muses him, blinds him, forces him to act mechanically in a frenetic
somnambulism.
Nowhere do we better observe that the possibility of medita–
tion is in truth the essential attribute of man than at the zoo, before
the cages of our cousins the monkeys. The bird and the crustacean
are forms of life too remote from our own for us to see, compar–
ing them with ourselves, anything but gross, abstract differences,
vague by their very extremity. But the ape is so like ourselves that
it invites us to pursue the comparison, to discover more concrete
and more fertile differences.
If
we are able to remain still for a time in passive contempla–
tion of the simian scene, one of its characteristics will presently,
and as if spontaneously, become dominant and strike us like a
flash of lightning. And this is that the infernal little beasts are con–
stantly on the alert, perpetually uneasy, looking and listening for
all the signals that reach them from their surroundings, intent upon
their environment as if they feared some constant peril in it, to
which they must automatically respond by flight or bite, the
mechanical discharge of a muscular reflex. The creature, in short,
