The Solitude of Compassion Read Online Free PDF Page A

who does not boast of his opinions but who is
capable of being moved, a simple man who is devoted, loving and loyal is far better able to tell you about a writer like Giono than the learned critics. Trust the man whose heart is moved, the man whose withers can still be wrung. Such men are with the writer when he orders his creation. They do not desert the writer when he moves in ways beyond their understanding. Becoming is their silence and instructive. Like the very wise, they know how to hold themselves in abeyance.
    â€œEach day,” says Miguel de Unamuno, “I believe less and less in the social question, and in the political question, and in the moral question, and in all the other questions that people have invented in order that they shall not have to face resolutely the only real question that exists—the human question. So long as we are not facing this question, all that we are now doing is simply making a noise so that we shall not hear it.”
    Giono is one of the writers of our time who faces this human question squarely. It accounts for much of the disrepute in which he has found himself. Those who are active on the periphery regard him as a renegade. In their view he is not playing the game. Some refuse to take him seriously because he is “only a poet.” Some admit that he has a marvellous gift for narrative but no sense of reality. Some believe that he is writing a legend of his region and not the story of our time. Some wish us to believe that he is only a dreamer. He is all these things and more. He is a man who never detaches himself from the world, even when he is dreaming. Particularly the world of human beings. In his books he speaks as father, mother, brother, sister, son and daughter. He does not depict the human family against the background of nature, he makes the human family a part of nature. If there is suffering and punishment, it is because of the operation of divine law through
nature. The cosmos which Giono’s figures inhabit is strictly ordered. There is room in it for all the irrational elements. It does not give, break or weaken because the fictive characters who compose it sometimes move in contradiction of or defiance to the laws which govern our everyday world. Giono’s world possesses a reality far more understandable, far more durable than the one we accept as world reality. Tolstoy expressed the nature of this other deeper reality in his last work:
    This then is everything that I would like to say: I would say to you that we are living in an age and under conditions that cannot last and that, come what may, we are obliged to choose a new path. And in order to follow it, it is not necessary for us to invent a new religion nor to discover new scientific theories in order to explain the meaning of life or art as a guide. Above all it is useless to turn back again to some special activity; it is necessary to adopt one course alone to free ourselves from the superstitions of false Christianity and of state rule.
    Let each one realize that he has no right, nor even the possibility, to organize the life of others; that he should lead his own life according to the supreme religious law revealed to him, and as soon as he has done this, the present order will disappear; the order that now reigns among the so-called Christian nations, the order that has caused the whole world to suffer, that conforms so little to the voice of conscience and that renders humanity more miserable every day. Whatever you are: ruler, judge, landlord, worker, or tramp, reflect and have pity on your soul. No matter how clouded your brain has become through
power, authority and riches, no matter how maltreated and harassed you are by poverty and humiliation, remember that you possess and manifest, as we all do, a divine spirit which now asks clearly: Why do you martyrize yourself and cause suffering to everyone with whom you come in contact? Understand, rather, who you really are, how truly