NATURE has been generous to none but those she has dispensed from thinking about death. The others she has condemned to the oldest fear and the most corrosive one, without offering or even suggesting a means of recovery. If it is normal to die, it is not so to dally over death nor to think about it at every tum. The man who never takes his mind off it betrays his vanity; since he lives in terms of the image others form of him, he cannot accept the notion that one day he will be nothing; oblivion being his continual nightmare, he is aggressive and bilious, and misses no opportunity to display his temper, his bad manners. Is there not a certain inelegance in fearing death? This fear which preys on the ambitious leaves the pure untouched; it grazes them without taking hold. The rest suffer it testily and resent all those who simply do not experience it. A Tolstoy will not forgive their luck, and will punish them by inflicting it upon them, by describing it with an exactitude which renders it both repugnant and contagious. His art will consist in making every agony the agony and in obliging the reader to tell himself, horrified and fascinated: "That is how you die." Into the interchangeable decor, the conventional world in which Ivan Ilyich lives, bursts sickness. At first he supposes it is no more than a passing discomfort, an inconsequential infirmity; then, under the effect of increasingly explicit suffering which soon grows intolerable, finally understanding the gravity of his case, he loses courage. "At certain moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied. He longed to be petted and comforted. He knew he was an important functionary, that he had a beard turning gray, and that therefore what he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it." -Cruelty, in literature at least, is a sign of election. The more gifted the writer, the more he devotes himself to confining his characters in hopeless situations; he pursues them, tyrannizes them, forces them to confront every detail of the impasse or the agony into which he has thrust them.
More than cruelty, it is ferocity which is required in order to insist on the eruption of the incurable amid the insignificant, on the last nuance of horror allotted to a commonplace individual under the scourge. "Suddenly Ivan Ilyich felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and mysterious." Tolstoy, so parsimonious with his adjectives, finds six to characterize a sensation-one of pain, it is true. The flesh appearing to him as a fragile and yet terrifying reality, as the great provider of scares, it is correctly that he envisages the phenomenon of death as starting from there. No denouement in the absolute, independent of our organs and our ills. How does one die inside a system? How does one rot? Metaphysics leaves no room for the corpse. Nor, moreover, for the living being. The more abstract and impersonal one becomes, whether this is the result of concepts or of prejudices (philosophers and ordinary minds both move in the unreal), the more inconceivable seems an imminent, immediate death. Without disease, Ivan Ilyich -an ordinary mind, certainly -would have no modeling, no consistency. It is sickness which, in destroying him, confers upon him a dimension of being. Soon he will be nothing more; before the disease, he was nothing as well; he is only in the interval which extends between the void of health and that of death, he exists only as long as he is dying. Then what was he previously? A puppet fascinated by images, a magistrate who believed in his profession and his family. Disabused of the false and the illusory, he understands now that until the appearance of his sickness he had wasted his time in trivialities. What will remain of so many years are the few weeks in which he will have suffered and in which sickness will have revealed to him realities unsuspected before. Real life begins and ends with agony, such is the lesson to be learned from the ordeal of Ivan Ilyich, no less than from that of Brekhunov in Master and Man. Since it is our destruction which saves us, let us keep vivid in ourselves the superstition of our last moments: they alone, in Tolstoy's eyes, will liberate us from the old fear, by them alone we shall triumph over it. It poisons us, it is our wound; if we would be cured, let us have patience, let us wait. This conclusion is one that few sages will ratify; for to aspire to wisdom is to seek to conquer that particular fear without delay.
If Tolstoy was always preoccupied by death, it became a besetting problem for him only after the crisis he passed through during his fiftieth year or there-abouts, when he began, in a panic, to question himself as to the "meaning" of life. But life, as soon as one is obsessed by what it may signify - life disintegrates, crumbles: which sheds a light on what it is, on what it is worth, on its wretched and improbable substance. Must one assert with Goethe that the meaning of life resides in life itself? A man haunted by such a problem will find this difficult, for the good reason that his obsession begins precisely with the revelation of the meaninglessness of life.
Some have tried to explain Tolstoy's crisis and his "conversion" by the exhaustion of his gifts. The explanation does not hold up. Certain works of the final period, like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man, Father Sergius, The Devil, have a depth and a density no exhausted genius could have displayed. Tolstoy did not dry up, but he shifted his center of interest. Reluctant to brood further upon the external life of men, he chose to consider them only from the moment when, subject to a crisis too, they were led to break with the fictions in which they had lived here-tofore. Under these conditions, it was no longer possible for him to write great novels. The pact with appearances which he had signed as a novelist he now denounced and tore up, to turn toward the other side of things. The crisis he entered, however, was neither so unexpected nor so radical as he thought when he wrote: "My life stopped." Far from being unforeseen, it actually represented the outcome, the exasperation of an anguish from which he had always suffered. (If The Death of Ivan Ilyich dates from 1886, all the themes it deals with are to be found in Three Deaths, from 1859.) But his early, "natural" anguish, being devoid of intensity, was tolerable, whereas the anguish he experienced later was scarcely so. The idea of death, to which Tolstoy was sensitive from childhood, has nothing morbid about it in itself; the same is not true of the obsession, the unwarranted development of this idea which then becomes fatal to the practice of life. This is doubtless the case if one accepts the viewpoint of life . . . But may one not conceive of a need for truth which, faced with the ubiquity of death, rejects every concession, as well as every distinction between normal and pathological?
If only the fact of dying counts, one must draw the consequences without bothering about any other considerations. This is not a position to be adopted by those who unceasingly bemoan their "crisis," a state aspired to, on the contrary, by the true solitary who would never sink to saying "my life stopped," for that is precisely what he wants, what he pursues. But a Tolstoy, rich and famous, gratified by all that the world can bestow, stares bewildered at the collapse of his old certainties and strives in vain to banish from his mind the recent revelation of meaninglessness which invades, which overwhelms him. What amazes and baffles him in his case is that for all his vitality (he worked, he tells us, eight hours a day without feeling tired, and reaped in the fields as well as any peasant), he had to resort to various subterfuges to keep from killing himself.
Vitality constitutes no obstacle to suicide: everything depends on the direction it takes or is given. Tolstoy himself observes, moreover, that the power which impelled him to self-destruction was similar to the one which had previously attached him to life - with this difference, he adds, that it now exerted itself in the opposite direction.
To search for the gaps in Being, to rush headlong to destruction in an excess of lucidity, to undermine and destroy oneself is not the privilege of the anemic; powerful natures, once they enter into conflict with themselves, are much more susceptible to this process; to it they bring all their passion, all their frenzy; indeed, it is such natures who suffer "crises" which we must regard as a punishment, for it is not normal that they should devote their energy to devouring themselves. Once they have attained the zenith of their career, they will asphyxiate under the weight of insoluble problems or collapse into a vertigo apparently stupid but actually legitimate and essential, the kind that seized Tolstoy when, in utter confusion, he kept murmuring to himself: "What's the use?" or "And then what?" A man who has had an experience analogous to that of Ecclesiastes will remember it forever; the truths he will have gained from it are as irrefutable as they are impracticable: banalities ruinous to balance, maddening commonplaces. In the modern world, no one has had the intuition of inanity which so gratifyingly counters the hopes crammed into the Old Testament so distinctly as Tolstoy. Even when he sets himself up, later on, as a reformer, he cannot answer Solomon, the being with whom he has most points in common: were they not both great sensualists struggling with a universal disgust? This is a conflict with no outcome, a contradiction of temperaments, from which derives perhaps the vision of Vanity. The more inclined we are to take pleasure in everything, the more disgust persists in keeping us from doing so, and its interventions will be vigorous in direct proportion to the impatience of our thirst for pleasure.
"Thou shalt not enjoy!"- such is the command it utters at each encounter, upon every forgetful occsion. Existence has a flavor only if we keep ourselves in a gratuitous intoxication, in that state of inebriation without which the self possesses nothing positive.
When Tolstoy assures us that before his crisis he was "drunk with life," he means that he was simply alive, in other words, that he was drunk as is every living being as such. Then comes the sobering up, which assumes the image of fatality. What is to be done?
One has the means to be drunk, but one cannot be so; in full vigor, yet one is not in life, one does not belong to it any longer; one breaks through it, discerns its unreality, for the sobering up is clearsightedness and awakening. And to what does one awaken, if not to death?
Ivan Ilyich wanted to be petted and comforted; more miserable than his hero, Tolstoy compares himself to a fledgling fallen from the nest! His drama compels sympathy, though we cannot subscribe to the reasons he alleges in order to explain it. The "negative" part is, in him, far more interesting than the other. If his questions rise from the deepest part of his being, the same is not true of his answers. That the perplexities he suffered during his crisis verged on the intolerable is a fact; instead of trying to rid himself of them for this motive alone, he chooses to tell us that, being the characteristic of the rich and the idle and never of the moujiks, they are devoid of any intrinsic significance. Obviously he underestimates the advantages of satiety, which permits certain discoveries forbidden to indigence. The surfeited, the blase are a party to certain truths mistakenly labeled false or temerarious, truths whose value subsists even when the kind of life which has brought them into being is condemned. What entitles us to reject those of Ecclesiastes? If we put ourselves on the level of actions, it will be difficult, obviously, to assent to his disenchantment. But Ecclesiastes does not consider action to be a criterion. Hence he remains in his posi-tion, as the others do in theirs.
In order to justify his cult of the moujiks Tolstoy invokes their detachment, their readiness to depart from this life without bothering about futile problems. Does he appreciate them, does he really love them? Rather he envies them, believing them less complicated than they are. He supposes they glide into death, that for them death is a comfort, that in the middle of a snowstorm they surrender like Nikita, while Brekhunov resists, struggles. "What is the easiest way to die?" - that is the question which has dominated his maturity and tormented his old age. The simplicity he has ceaselessly sought he has found nowhere, except in his style. He was too ravaged to achieve it. Like every tormented spirit, exhausted and subjugated by his sufferings, he could love only trees and animals, and only those men who by some char-acteristic were akin to the elements. From their contact he expected - no doubt about it - to wrest him - self from his habitual pangs and to proceed toward an endurable, even a serene agony. To reassure himself, to encounter peace at any cost is all that mattered to him. We see now why Ivan Ilyich could not be allowed to die in disgust or in dread. "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?' There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light. 'So that's what it is!' he suddenly exclaimed aloud. 'What joy!'"
Neither this joy nor this light carry conviction; they are extrinsic, they are imposed. We are reluctant to admit that they can alleviate the darkness in which the dying man is struggling: nothing moreover prepared him for this jubilation, which has no relation to his mediocrity, nor to the solitude to which he is reduced. On the other hand, the description of his agony is so oppressive in its exactitude that it would have been almost impossible to end it without changing its tone and level. "'Death is finished,' he said to himself. 'It is no more.' " Prince Andre wanted to be convinced of the same thing. "Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." More skeptical about Prince Andre's final divagations than he was to be later on about those of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy adds:
"These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and rationalizing; they lacked reality." Unfortunately those of poor Ivan Ilyich lacked it quite as much. But Tolstoy has come a long way since War and Peace: he has reached a stage where at all costs he must elaborate a formula for salvation and abide by it. That imposed light and joy - how can we help feeling that he dreamed of them for himself and that, quite as much as simplicity, they were forbidden to him? No less dreamed of are the last words he makes his hero speak about the end of death. Let us compare with this end which is not an end, with this conventional and arbitrary triumph, the genuine and authentic hatred which this same hero feels toward his family: "In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself - all that for which he had lived - and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which choked and stifled him. And he hated them all on that account."
Hatred does not lead to deliverance, nor is it clear how one leaps from abomination of the world and self-loathing into that zone of purity where death is transcended, "finished." To hate oneself and the world is to give both too much credit, and disqualifies one for emancipation from either. Self-hatred, above all, testifies to a capital illusion. Because he hated himself, Tolstoy believed he was no longer living a lie.
Now, unless one devotes oneself to renunciation (of which he was incapable), one can live only by lying and by lying to oneself. Which is what Tolstoy did, moreover: is it not a lie to assert, trembling, that one has conquered death and the fear of death? This sensualist who incriminated the senses, who always opposed himself, who enjoyed persecuting his inclinations, applied himself with perverse ardor to taking a path opposed to what he was. A voluptuous need to
torment himself drove him toward the insoluble. He was a writer, the first of his time; instead of deriving some satisfaction from the fact, he invented a vocation for himself, that of the Good Man, at every point alien to his tastes. He began to interest himself in the poor, to help them, to bemoan their condition, but his pity - alternately despairing and indiscreet - was merely a form of his horror of the world. Sullenness, his dominant characteristic, occurs in those who, convinced they have taken the wrong turn and missed their true destination, regret having remained beneath themselves. Despite his considerable oeuvre, Tolstoy had this feeling; let us not forget that he had come to regard his works as frivolous, even harmful; he had created them, but he had not created himself. His sullenness resulted from the interval separating his literary success from his spiritual frustration.
Sakyamuni, Solomon, Schopenhauer - of these three melancholies he so often quotes, the first went furthest and is doubtless the one Tolstoy would have preferred to resemble: he might have managed it, if disgust for the world and oneself sufficed to grant access to Nirvana. But then, Buddha left his family when he was very young (one cannot imagine him trapped in conjugal dramas, surrounded by his house-hold, irresolute and moody, cursing everyone for keeping him from carrying out his grand design), while Tolstoy would wait for decrepitude to make his escape - that spectacular and painful episode. If the discrepancy between his doctrine and his life bothered him, he nonetheless lacked the strength to do anything about it. How would he have gone about it, given the incompatibility between his concerted aspirations and his deepest instincts? In order to measure the scope of his torments (as they are revealed, notably, in Father Sergius), we should recall that he strove in secret to imitate the saints and that of all his ambitions this one was the most imprudent. By proposing a model so disproportionate to his means, he inevitably inflicted further disappointments upon himself. If only he had meditated upon the verse of the Bhagavad-Gita, according to which it is better to perish by one's own law than to obey another's! And it is precisely because he sought salvation elsewhere than on his own path that in his so-called "regeneration" period he was even more miserable than before.
With a pride like Tolstoy's, the pursuit of charity was a mistake: the more he aspired to it, the more grim he became. His radical incapacity to love, combined with an icy clearsightedness, explains why he cast upon all things, singularly upon his characters, a gaze without complicity. "Reading his works, one never has an impulse to laugh or even smile," noted one Russian critic toward the end of the last century.
Conversely, we have quite failed to understand Dostoevsky if we do not realize that humor is his chief quality. He is carried away, he forgets himself, and since he is never cold, he reaches that temperature, that degree of fever where, reality being transfigured, the fear of death is meaningless, since one has risen above it. He has transcended it, triumphed over it, as suits a visionary, and he would have been quite incapable of describing a deathbed with that clinical precision in which a Tolstoy excels. We may add that the latter is, moreover, a clinician sui generis: he never studies anything but his own ills and, when he treats them, brings to the work all the acuity and all the vigilance of his terrors.
It has often been remarked that Dostoevsky, sick and impoverished, ended his career with an apotheosis (the speech on Pushkin!), whereas Tolstoy, fortune's darling, was to conclude his in despair. Upon reflection, the contrast in their denouements is quite in order. Dostoevsky, after the rebellions and ordeals of his youth, thought of nothing but serving; he reconciled himself if not with the universe at least with his country whose abuses he accepted and justified; he believed it was Russia's destiny to play a great role, he believed she was even to save humanity. The former conspirator, now established and pacified, could without imposture defend the Church and the State; in any case, he was no longer alone. Tolstoy, on the other hand, was to become more and more so. He plunged into desolation, and if he spoke so much of a "new life," it was because life itself escaped him.
The religion he believed he was rejuvenating he was in fact undermining. Combating injustice, he went further than the anarchists, and the formulas he advanced were of a demoniac or laughable excess. What accounts for so much extravagance, so much negation is the revenge of a mind which could never bring itself to accept the humiliation of dying.
Cioran from:
The Fall into Time
No comments:
Post a Comment