Against the Pollution of the I Read online

  Owning an I is not easy, and keeping it is even harder. Perhaps the search for happiness is not the right approach. And that brings me to the most vexing and urgent problem of all, one that I wish I could avoid, but one about which facts forbid me to remain silent: the problem of the so aptly named “trip,” the drug-induced trip. Into what lands do these trips lead?

  I suppose there will be controversy over the degree of harmfulness of the various drugs for a long time to come. If heroin has no chance of passing muster, marijuana for its part has practically passed already. All that is needed, we are told, is to treat it like ordinary tobacco, to make it commercially available and legal. One already hears talk about it on the morning news; not necessarily every day, but at least once a week. I shall not try to resolve that dilemma. I am not particularly curious to know whether or not mescaline results in irreversible addiction. In my eyes all drugs, harsh or gentle, pose the same problem, one that is not at all medical in nature: Is it right to entrust the fate of our souls to chemical substances? Must we rely on sleeping pills for sleep, on herbs for peace of mind, on hallucinogens for happiness? Does that make sense? Is it permissible? And by that I do not mean morally permissible (for morality changes continually in every way, and most of the time it deludes itself), but permissible in the context of natural order. And that is the question I never hear asked, at least not in official circles.

  I understand very well why so many young people today are drawn to drugs. I understand, you may be sure, that they want to draw a curtain over a world in which entire populations or huge forests are wiped out every day, where persecution is not a matter of passion but of calculated science. And in truth, how in the long run can we endure a civilization where the soul is diminished, channeled, labeled, insulted? How can we find satisfaction in a society in which fantasy will soon be good for nothing more than to fill our leisure hours, where everything has to be weighed — even down to happiness — as cement is weighed, or fertilizer? I well understand that they are possessed of only one desire: to get away. But if they leave, do they ever arrive? They really ought to be told that they never will arrive!

  I had a very dear friend — it must have been some fifteen years ago. He was a profoundly cultured man, but he claimed not to be musical. And that deficiency troubled him. To him music was pleasant but obscure. He perceived it as an undifferentiated mass whose component parts he was unable to distinguish. One day this man tried mescaline, and while under the drug’s influence listened to a recording of Bach’s B-minor Mass. Wonder of wonders! From the very first moment the individual voices in the “Kyrie” chorus were there for him to hear, each one separate and distinct. A few days later he told me of his discovery. I said, “Let us try it again, but without mescaline.” He no longer heard the individual voices of the choir; he could no longer follow their musical line.

  That is typical of the way all drugs work. What they give, they take away again. They fill us with bliss, only to drain us the more dry. With their help we visit far and exotic lands, but when the journey is over we cannot describe them, and we will never take anyone else there. The reason for this is simple: we are not really there ourselves; we left our I behind.

  All drugs without exception work against the I. They set upon it to ravage it. They live through its absence. And that is why, in my eyes, the world of drugs will never be the world of man.

  But must we then really be satisfied with the little we have? For I have not hesitated to admit it: the I in us is not strong. It leaves us in a state of starvation. As yet it equips us with only the most feeble of weapons against all that it is not. Truly, we are most poorly armed against the invasion of computations, of matter, of abstraction. But that is just one more reason for not giving up as much as one jot of what we do have of I.

  Moreover, does it not almost seem that the world of things and abstractions makes use of drugs as weapons against us? What a golden opportunity we would give it if we were to be asleep. Let us imagine (if the thought is not too painful) that human life were divided into two equal parts: one that fell under the dominion of numbers, of speed, of material efficiency, of production, of obedience; and the other in which everyone would curl up and hide, in order then to dissolve away in the artificial universe of drugs. Then the insoluble problem of how to control mankind, how to deliver it into slavery — for which no solution has been found throughout the millennia — would at last no longer exist. It would then only be necessary to lay in the proper supplies. Please excuse this flight of fancy, but it really forces itself on me — to this day I have trouble understanding the policy of super-arming by the great powers, when an espionage network coupled with indirect persuasion and a gradual campaign of secret drug distribution would sooner or later infallibly put the enemy to sleep, and thus achieve the final object of all war.

  I should like to believe that without knowing it I am being overly dramatic. But I do not think that I am dramatizing. That germ of humanity in each of us, our I, needs us. Already we have put it out of mind so as to leave our spirit untrammeled during the building of the abstract, technological world. And now drugs drive the I out of another refuge, that of our emotions — no, that is not strong enough: out of our very soul itself. Sorrow and joy have always been man’s possessions; they have been his exclusive domain, his pride or his shame. Must we now do without the one and without the other? Shall we turn to other forces than our own to drive out sadness, to intensify joy? We are already so fragile; if it really came to that, we would shatter like glass! I well remember the report of an American army psychologist concerning American soldiers taken prisoner by the Chinese during the Korean war — and bear in mind that this was well before drugs had reached their present flood tide. These men were subjected to rigorous brainwashing. Now such diabolical therapy contains without question all that is necessary to rob even the strongest of their I. But what staggered the army psychologist was the rapidity with which the captors were able to strip the minds and hearts of these young Americans of all that made them American — their belief in their own rights, in their equality as human beings, even their belief in the possibility of happiness. I did not find it so astonishing. As human beings, we have all been touched by the force that we call “the I,” but it is not riveted to our bodies. It is at all times ready to give up its place. It practically cries out for its own submergence by things, by numbers, by systems, by endless pleasure, and by drugs. And that is why I say that there is danger, most pressing danger. The I is being polluted even more rapidly than the earth.

  IT MAY BE that some of you have been wondering for some time in the name of what somber philosophy I harbor such grave fears for the future of the human I. Philosophy has nothing at all to do with it, you may be sure. I speak from experience; and before I close I should like, if I may, to recall an episode from my own life by way of illustration.

  In January 1944, together with two thousand other Frenchmen, I was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The rules required all our personal belongings to be taken from us immediately on entering the camp: our clothes, our wedding rings, even orthopedic appliances. Immediately thereafter we passed into a second room, where we were forced to immerse ourselves — head as well as body — in a bath of Xylol, an extremely strong disinfectant. Then we were thrust into a third room, where electric shears hung by their cords from the ceiling. There, guards meticulously shaved every last hair from our bodies. Like so many of the measures taken in concentration camps, this one clearly had two interrelated objectives: to assure hygiene, and to inflict humiliation.

  And so we passed under the shears in batches of about thirty men. I knew my comrades well, for we had just lived through three days and three nights of travel in cattle cars. All were what at that time were called “political prisoners” — in other words, men who had voluntarily taken part in the resistance against Nazism. There was not a coward among them, not one with any second thoughts. I could depend fully on their powers of resistance. And yet s
uddenly, in the midst of that ludicrous shearing operation, I was stunned to hear sobs. Yes, several of the men were actually weeping. One was a well-known physician, another a baker, a third a professor of sociology — all men very much different from one another. Very different, and yet they wept together, and their tears seemed to say, “Let me keep what I have!”

  During the next few days I made it a point to speak with these men. Please don’t think for a moment that I held them in contempt! Once one has passed through certain trials in life, one cannot feel anything but loving sympathy towards human weakness. But what had gone on in them? That is what I had to find out. Reluctantly, haltingly, but quite unambiguously, the baker and the sociologist gave essentially the same explanation. Without their clothes, without their hair, these men felt themselves no longer alive. No one would be able to recognize them anymore, stripped as they were of their distinctiveness. That thought plunged them into a state of such utter destitution that they were unable to bear it.

  But that is not yet the end of my story. The incident that brought these men to tears occurred on January 24th. By the first of March, every one of them was dead. I have to state here that conditions at Buchenwald were very hard. But they were no harder for those men than for all the others. They died — how could I have failed to realize it? — of lack of I, of I-paralysis.

  FOR TWO OR THREE CENTURIES NOW, thinkers have felt themselves entitled to speak of the death of God. Some have proclaimed it as an established fact. I have always looked on their declarations as an ultimate and quite pathetic abstraction. God can no more die than can the I of man. So that when I say our I is fragile, I mean it in a quite specific sense.

  Our I is fragile because invariably it diminishes when it is not active. That is not a mere assertion of the intellect; it is a law, and one whose demands we feel more strongly today than ever before. If our I gives itself over to anything but itself, it is we who are the immediate victims. We shall have a few moments of heightened pleasure, for there is pleasure also in sleeping; but we shall never again know joy.

  And is that not, after all, the true import of those words so many of us use every day: “religion,” or in a different vocabulary, “yoga”? The one as well as the other means “reunion,” the establishment of a bond. But it most certainly is not enough merely to pay lip service to that bond between the individual man and the universal principle. It has to be desired quite consciously. And if to this day I am beset by fear, it is because I see a steadily growing number of people who no longer have any desire for such a connection. But on the other hand I also remember that this work of the I, slow and arduous though it may be and subject to all the pitfalls of the mind and of the senses, is yet the most charged with hope of any that we are able to undertake. And I know that I am not alone in my love of it, nor in my determination to take it up.

  CHAPTER 5

  JEREMY

  THE FIRST MAN ON MY PATH IS AN OLD MAN. And you cannot imagine how happy this makes me.

  I do not know if there is a greater blessing than to encounter a true old person, that is, one who is joyous. It is a blessing which is rarely given to us, because for most, alas, age is nothing but the blank and degrading addition of physical years. But when an old person is joyful, he is so strong that he no longer needs to speak: he comes and he heals. The one who fills my memory is like this. His name is Jeremy Regard.

  It is not I who would give him this name. It was his. How many novelists would like to have invented it?

  I would like to be very modest, you know, in describing him, because he was so great and yet seemed so little. He made such a brief passage through my life — only a few weeks — that I can no longer remember his body. I vaguely perceive a man who is vigorous, straight, thickset. Yes, a small man, according to physical measurements. As for his face, I can’t see it. I think that I never asked myself any questions about his face, even then. I saw another which was much more real.

  I met him in January 1944, in the midst of the war, in Germany, when I was in a concentration camp at age nineteen. He was one of the six thousand French who arrived in Buchenwald between the 22nd and 26th of January. But he was unlike any other.

  Here I must stop for a moment, because I have written the word “Buchenwald.” I will often be writing of it. But do not expect a picture of the horrors of the deportation. These horrors were real, and they are not pleasant to talk about. To have the right to speak about them, it would be necessary to be a healer — and not just of the body. I will content myself then with the indispensable, the basic scenario.

  Sometimes I will even speak of the deportation in a manner which is scandalous for some, I mean paradoxical: I will say in what it was good, I will show what riches it contained.

  If I come back to it sometimes, it is because it stands at the very entrance of my life, an attic bursting with pains and joys, with questions and answers.

  Jeremy did not speak of the concentration camps either, even when he was there. He did not have his gaze nailed to the smoke from the crematorium, nor on the twelve hundred terrified prisoners of Block 57. He was looking through.

  At first I didn’t know who he was — people spoke to me of “Socrates.”

  My neighbors, who were very numerous, pronounced this name which was utterly unexpected in the swarming fear and cold in which we tossed. “Socrates said . . .,” “Socrates laughed. . . .” Socrates was over there, a little further, on the other side of this crowd of closely shaven men. I did not understand why all these people called one person out of everyone Socrates. But I wished to meet him.

  Finally one day I saw him — that is, I must have seen him, for to tell the truth, I have no memory of the first meeting.

  I know only that I was expecting an eloquent reasoner, a clever metaphysician, some sort of triumphant moral philosopher. That is not at all what I found.

  He was a simple welder from a small village at the foot of the Jura mountains. He had come to Buchenwald for reasons which had so little to do with the essential that I never knew them or asked about them.

  His name was not Socrates, as you already know, but Jeremy, and I didn’t understand why this name wasn’t enough for his companions.

  Jeremy’s tale was that of a welder from a particular part of the world, a village in France. He loved to tell it with broad smiles. He told it very simply, as any tradesman talks about his trade. And here and there one could just barely glimpse a second forge standing there, a forge of the spirit.

  Yes, I said “spiritual.” However, the word has been spoiled by overuse. But this time it is true and full.

  I heard Jeremy speak of men who did not come to his shop just for their horses and their wagons but for themselves. They came so as to go home all steeled and new, to take home a little of the life they were lacking and which they found overflowing, shining and gentle at the forge of father Jeremy.

  At this time I was a student. I had hardly ever experienced such men; they do not fill the universities. I thought that when a man possessed wisdom, he immediately said it, and said how and why and according to which affiliation of thought. Especially, I thought that in order to be wise, it was necessary to think, and to think rigorously.

  I stood with my mouth open before Jeremy because he didn’t think. He told stories, almost always the same, he shook your shoulders, he seemed to be addressing invisible beings through you. He always had his nose smack in the obvious, the close-at-hand. If he spoke about the happiness of a neighbor upon leaving his shop, it was as if he spoke about a wart, a bump, which had just been removed. He observed things of the spirit with his eyes, as doctors observe microbes through their microscopes. He made no distinction. And the more I saw him do this, the more the weight of the air diminished for me.

  I have encountered startling beings, beings whose gestures and words so dazzled that in their presence one had to lower one’s eyes. Jeremy was not startling. Not a bit! He wasn’t there to stir us up.

  It was not curiosity wh
ich impelled me toward him. I needed him as a man who is dying of thirst needs water. Like all important things, this was elemental.

  I see Jeremy walking through our barracks. A space formed itself among us. He stopped somewhere and, all at once, men pressed in tighter, yet still leaving him a little place in their midst. This was a completely instinctive movement which one cannot explain simply by respect. We drew back rather as one steps back to leave a place for one who is working.

  You must picture that we were more than a thousand men in this barracks, a thousand where four hundred would have been uncomfortable. Imagine that we were all afraid, profoundly and immediately. Do not think of us as individuals, but as a protoplasmic mass. In fact, we were glued to one another. The only movements we made were pushing, clutching, pulling apart, twisting. Now you will better understand the marvel (so as not to say “miracle”) of this small distance, this circle of space with which Jeremy remained surrounded.

  He was not frightening, he was not austere, he was not even eloquent. But he was there, and that was tangible. You felt it as you feel a hand on the shoulder, a hand which summons, which brings you back to yourself when you were about to disappear.

  Each time he appeared, the air became breathable: I got a breath of life smack in the face. This was perhaps not a miracle, but it was at least a very great act, and one of which he alone was capable. Jeremy’s walk across the quad was that: a breathing. In my memory I can follow distinctly the path of light and clarity which he made through the crowd.