Now there are certain spirits we can compare to these sufferers, spirits whom a kind of laziness or frivolousness prevents from descending on their own into the deeper regions of themselves where true mental life begins.8 It is not that, once led there, they are unable to discover and exploit these true riches, but without such outside intervention they live on the surface, in a perpetual forgetting of themselves, a kind of passivity which makes them the plaything of every pleasure and reduces them to the stature of those who surround them, jostling them this way and that; like the gentleman who, having led the life of a highway brigand since childhood, no longer remembers the name he has long since ceased to bear, they will end by abolishing in themselves every feeling, every memory, of their inner nobility, unless an exterior impulse comes to forcibly reintroduce them into mental life, where they will suddenly recapture the power to think for themselves and to create.
Clearly this impulse, which the lazy spirit cannot find in itself and which has to come from another, can be received only in the bosom of solitude, outside of which, as we have seen, precisely the creative activity that is to be resurrected in him cannot occur. Nothing can result from the pure solitude of the lazy spirit, because that spirit is unable to set its creative activity in motion by itself, but even the loftiest conversation or the most insistent advice would not help it in the slightest either, because it cannot directly produce original activity.
What is needed, therefore, is an intervention that occurs deep within ourselves while coming from someone else, the impulse of another mind that we receive in the bosom of solitude. As we have seen, this is precisely the definition of reading and fits nothing but reading. Thus the only discipline which can exert a beneficial influence on such minds is reading: Q.E.D., as the geometers say.
But here too, reading is merely a kind of instigation, which can in no way substitute for our personal activity; reading is happy simply to give us back the use of this ability, the way the psychotherapist, in the nervous ailments to which we have just alluded, merely restores the sufferer’s will to use his stomach, his legs, his brain, all of which have remained unharmed.
Whether or not every spirit shares this laziness to a greater or lesser extent, this stagnation in the worst cases, and whether or not the exaltation which follows certain kinds of reading may, without being strictly necessary, have a certain propitious influence on one’s own labours, we may cite more than one writer who liked to read a beautiful page before sitting down to work. Emerson rarely began to write without re-reading several pages of Plato; Dante is not the only poet whom Virgil has brought to the threshold of paradise.
Insofar as reading initiates us, insofar as her magic key opens the door deep inside us to the dwelling places we would not otherwise have known how to reach, its role in our life is a salutary one.
On the other hand, reading becomes dangerous when, instead of awakening us to an individual inner life, it takes its place: when truth no longer seems to us an ideal we can realise only by the intimate progression of our thoughts and the efforts of our heart, but instead starts to seem like a material thing deposited in the pages of books, like honey made by others, which we can taste, passively, in a perfect repose of body and mind, merely by taking the trouble to reach out our hand to the library shelf.
It even happens sometimes, in certain rather exceptional and anyway, as we shall see, less dangerous cases, that the truth, still understood as external, is far away, hidden somewhere difficult to reach: in some private document, or unpublished letter, or obscure memoir that might shed an unexpected light on certain personalities. What happiness, what rest for a spirit exhausted by the search for the truth in himself, to be able to tell himself that the truth may be found somewhere else, between the folio pages of a volume jealously preserved in a Dutch convent, and if it requires a certain effort to reach it then at least these efforts will be physical and material, and for the mind merely a kind of respite, full of charm.
It will no doubt be necessary to take a long journey, travel by passenger barge across marshes swept by a wailing wind while the reeds on the riverbank bend and raise their heads one after another in an undulation without end; it will be necessary to stop in Dordrecht, whose ivy-covered church is reflected in the tracery of sleeping canals and in the whispering waters of the Meuse, gilt with gold, where gliding vessels in the evening disturb the reflected straight lines of red roofs and blue sky; and, finally, having reached the end of the journey, we will still not be sure of getting to the truth. We will need to put powerful influences into play, befriend the venerable archbishop of Utrecht with his handsome square face like an old Jansenist’s, and the pious keeper of the Amersfoort archives.
The conquest of the truth in a case like this is understood to be like the success of a sort of diplomatic mission, in which neither difficulties of the journey nor hazards of negotiation are lacking. But so what?
All the members of the tiny old church of Utrecht, on whose good will it depends whether or not we will enter into possession of the truth, are charming people whose faces, straight out of the seventeenth century, are a change from what we are used to; it will be amusing to stay in touch with them, if only by letter. The esteem they will continue to send us indications of from time to time will elevate us in our own eyes and we will preserve their letters as a guarantee of something, and a curiosity. And one day we will not fail to dedicate one of our books to them, which is certainly the least we can do for the people who have given us… the truth.
As for the few inquiries, the brief labours we will be obliged to undertake in the convent library, indispensable preliminaries to the act of entering into possession of the truth – a truth we will prudently take down in our notes so that there will be no risk of its escaping us – it would be ungrateful to complain of the difficulties these labours give us, for the calm and the cool air are so exquisite, in the old convent where the nuns still wear the high hennins with white wings that they have on their heads in the Roger van der Weyden painting in the locutory, and, while we work, the seventeenth-century bells so tenderly take the chill out of the ingenuous water of the canal that a little pale sun is enough to dazzle us between the double row of trees, bare of leaves since the end of summer, that brush the mirrors affixed to the gabled houses on either side.9
This conception of a truth that is deaf to the call of reflection and amenable to the play of external influences, a truth which can be obtained through letters of introduction, which can be placed in our hands by someone who physically possesses it (without, perhaps, understanding it), which lets itself be copied into a notebook – this conception of truth is still far from the most dangerous one.
Because, very often, for the historian and even for the scholar, this truth that they seek at a distance, in a book, is properly speaking less the truth itself than a sign or a proof, something that therefore makes way for another truth that it suggests or verifies, and this latter truth at least is an individual creation of his spirit.
It is not the same for a literary man. He reads for the sake of reading, to store up what he has read. For him the book is not an angel who takes flight as soon as he has opened the gates of the heavenly garden, but an idol, unmoving, worshipped for its own sake, that communicates a fake dignity to everything around it instead of receiving a true dignity from the thoughts it awakens.
The literary reader appeals to this fake dignity with a smile, in honour of some name that can be found in Villehardouin or Boccaccio,10 in admiration of a custom described in Virgil. His spirit lacks all original activity and does not know how to isolate in books the substance which could make it stronger; he weighs himself down with the book as a whole, which instead of being something he can assimilate, a life principle, is for him a foreign body, a death principle.
Need I add that if I describe this taste, this kind of fetishistic reverence for books, as unhealthy and pernicious, it is only relative to the ideal habits of a spirit altogether lacking in faults, one which does not exist; I do so like the physiologists who describe as an organ’s normal function something which is hardly ever found in living beings. In real life, on the other hand, where there are no perfect spirits any more than there are entirely
