Tales of Madness Read Online Free PDF Page B

that first wife of mine and myself, or perhaps of apologs. One small notebook, for example, is entitled The Timid Young Man, and certainly in it I was referring to that fine boy, son of a country merchant who was a business associate of mine. This boy would come to the city, sent by his father to visit me, and that wretched woman would invite him to have dinner with us in order to have some fun at his expense.
    I'm transcribing from that small notebook:
    Oh, Mirina, tell me. What sort of eyes do you have? Can't you see that the poor boy has caught on that you intend to make fun of him? You consider him stupid, but actually he's only timid — so timid that he doesn't know how to avoid the ridicule you expose him to, however much it makes him suffer internally. Oh Mirina, if the boy's suffering were no longer just something that made you laugh, if you weren't only aware of your wicked pleasure, but also at the same time, of his pain, don't you think you'd stop making him suffer, because your pleasure would be disturbed and destroyed by your awareness of someone else's pain? Obviously, Mirina, you're acting without being fully aware of your action, and you feel its effect only in yourself.
    That's it exactly. You must admit, for a madman, it's not bad. The trouble was that I didn't realize that it's one thing to reason, and quite another to live. A half, or about a half, of all those wretches who are kept locked up in asylums — aren't they perhaps people who wanted to live in accordance with common abstract reasoning? How much proof, how many examples I could cite here, if every sane individual today didn't recognize the fact that so many things one does or says in life, as well as certain customs and traditions, are really irrational, so that whoever justifies them is crazy.
    Such was I, after all, and such did I appear in my treatise. I would not have become aware of it, had Marta not lent me her eyeglasses.
    Meanwhile, those who do not wish to content themselves with a belief in God, because they say that that belief is founded on a sentiment that does not acknowledge reason, might be curious to see how I justified His existence in this treatise of mine. The trouble is, I now admit that this would be a difficult God for sane people. Indeed, it would also be quite an impractical one, because whoever would accept Him, would have to act towards others as I once did, that is, like a madman, treating others as one does himself, since those others are conscious beings just as we are. Whoever would truly do that, and would attribute to others a reality identical to his own, would of necessity possess the idea of a reality common to everyone, of a truth and even of an existence that transcends us — namely, God.
    But, I repeat, not for sane people.
    Meanwhile, it's curious to note that when I read The Little Flowers of St. Francis, for example (following our old custom of reading some good book before going to bed), Marta interrupts me from time to time to exclaim with reverence and great admiration:
    "What a saint! What a saint!"
    Like that.
    It's probably a temptation from the devil, but I put the book down on my lap and look at her for a while to find out whether she's really speaking earnestly in my presence. Now really, if one follows logic, St. Francis shouldn't be sane for her, or I would now...
    But of course, I convince myself that the sane have to be logical only up to a certain point.
    Let's go back to when I was crazy.
    At nightfall, in the villa, when my ears picked up the sound of distant bagpipes which led the march of the reapers returning in throngs to the village with their carts loaded with the harvest, I felt that the air between me and the things around me became gradually more intimate, and that I could see beyond the limits of natural vision. My spirit, attentive to and fascinated by that sacred communion with nature, descended to the threshold of the senses and perceived the slightest of motions, the