To be
born again is to renounce the old life, sin, and the natural man, and to
take to one's self another principle of life. It is to exist for God
with another self, another will, another love.
August 9, 1859.--Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so.
However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon
covers him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the
universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual
being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me
with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear--there
is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and
not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or
a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is
life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn,
all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my
consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself
then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My
travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from
my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like
a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva.
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