The Difficulty of Being Read Online Free PDF

them, whereupon the bounds appear and imprison us on every hand. It was when I became aware of this manoeuvre, to which they submit without guile, that I took to my heels as swiftly as I could and ratted. Their heart, my faith, my sincerity remain with me.
    La Lettre à Maritain
bears witness to this attack of doubt. I thought I could transfer to God’s account what was usually credited to the Devil’s. In it I set up hardness against purity. I referred to an admirable saying of Maritain’s: ‘The Devil is pure because he can do nothing but evil.’ If purity is not softness asserting itself, but a concrete matter, why should not such matter, rejected by weak goodness, be adopted byhard goodness, and so once more become part of it? I was ingenuous.
    In the gentle hands of priests a bomb only explodes if they so wish. They caught mine in mid-air and, wrapping it in layer upon layer of cotton wool, made of it an article of conversion, that is to say an example. My enemies saw in it nothing but a reactionary move. This futile attempt brought me nothing but a family and that outer support which some seek in the family, others in the Church, in sects, in the École Normale, in Polytechnics, in the Foreign Office, in a political party or in a café. Such support upset the habit I had long formed of not leaning on anything but myself.
    Maritain found my going heavy. He wanted to open a way for me. It was his own he opened to me. Alas I could not keep up with him, possessing neither the wings of angels nor the vast spiritual mechanism of that soul in the guise of a body. Deprived of my legs, nothing was left to me but fatigue. I escaped.
    I was listening last night to a young captain in my hotel telling me about his escapes from Germany and Spain. Back in France, after getting to London via Gibraltar, he suffers from a feeling of flatness and misses adventure. The same problem faces the whole of a younger generation, unconscious of the existence of internal wars, internal prisons, internal escapes, mortal dangers and internal tortures, and so, not knowing what it is to live, only catching a fortuitous glimpse of it and thinking itself no longer alive because circumstances no longer present it with the means to live. Mlle X … was a nurse in the American army. Women who do not tend the wounded revolt her. The least comfort shocks her. An elegant woman is an insult to her. She never suspects that this is the maternal instinct working in her, for which, lacking marriage and children, she makes another outlet.
    It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.
    The surprise of these exiles from drama would be great if they were to discover that those tragic episodes, whose sudden cessation has left them on the brink of a void, are just as plentiful in this void as in themselves. That it would be enough to retreat into themselves and pay the costs within instead of without. If the war could enlighten them as to how to use their talents on their own later on, it would be a rough school. But it only gives them an excuse for living faster, and real life appears to them like death. When I write that I escaped, after the letter to Maritain, I mean this literally. I experienced all the palpitations, the anguish, the uncertainty, the patience, the resourcefulness about which that captain used to talk to me. And this was not my first escape, nor my last. I have more than one to my credit.
    Jacques Maritain often visited me at the clinic where I was disintoxicating myself of opium. I had taken opium, formerly taken daily by our masters under the label of laudanum or opiates, in order to alleviate intolerable nervous