How hard it is
to bear--this long-drawn death, of which the stages are melancholy and
the end inevitable! It is easy to see why it was that stoicism
maintained the right of suicide. What is my real faith? Has the
universal, or at any rate the very general and common doubt of science,
invaded me in my turn? I have defended the cause of the immortality of
the soul against those who questioned it, and yet when I have reduced
them to silence, I have scarcely known whether at bottom I was not after
all on their side. I try to do without hope; but it is possible that I
have no longer the strength for it, and that, like other men, I must be
sustained and consoled by a belief, by the belief in pardon and
immortality--that is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type.
Reason and thought grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They must have
their sleep, and this sleep is the relapse into the tradition of
childhood, into the common hope. It takes so much effort to maintain
one's self in an exceptional point of view, that one falls back into
prejudice by pure exhaustion, just as the man who stands indefinitely
always ends by sinking to the ground and reassuming the horizontal
position.
What is to become of us when everything leaves us--health, joy,
affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, capacity for work--when
the sun seems to us to have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all
its charm? What is to become of us without hope? Must we either harden
or forget? There is but one answer--keep close to duty.
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