Inseparable from external approbation, can we conceive of a work which might be the product of an absolute autonomy? To make ourselves invulnerable is to close ourselves to almost every sensation we feel in the common life. The more we initiate ourselves into solitude, the more we long to lay down our pen. What and whom are we to talk about if others no longer count, if no one deserves the dignity of enmity? No longer to react to public opinion is an alarming symptom of fatal superiority, acquired to the detriment of our reflexes, and one which puts us in the attitude of an atrophied divinity, enchanted to move no longer because it finds nothing which deserves a gesture.

Quite the contrary, to feel we exist is to be infatuated with what is manifestly mortal, to worship insignificance, to be perpetually irritated at the heart of inanity, to fly into tantrums in the void. Those who yield to their emotions or to their whims, those who get carried away at any hour of the day or night, are immune from serious difficulties. Psychoanalysis counts only among certain peoples of the North who have the misfortune to believe in ennui, and is of no interest to the Latin peoples.

To be normal, to keep ourselves in good health, we should model ourselves not on the sage, but on the child. We should throw ourselves on the ground and cry every time we feel like it. What is more lamentable than to feel like crying and not to dare? Having unlearned tears, we are without resource, uselessly welded to our eyes. In antiquity, men wept, and in the Middle Ages, or during the Grand Siècle, the Sun King was easily moved to tears, according to Saint-Simon. Since then, aside from the Romantic interlude, discredit has been cast upon one of the most effective remedies man has ever possessed. Is this a passing disfavor or a new conception of honor? What seems certain is that a whole realm of the infirmities which torment us—all those diffuse, insidious, unlocalized ills—come from our obligation not to externalize our furies or our afflictions, and not to indulge our oldest instincts.

We should have the faculty of screaming at least a quarter of an hour every day; screaming rooms should even be created for this purpose. Speech, it will be objected, ought to suffice. Why return to such old-fashioned methods? Conventional by definition, alien to our imperious needs, speech is empty, extenuated, devoid of contact with our depths. Not one word emanates from or ventures into them. If at the beginning, at the moment when speech first appeared, it could serve, things are different now. Not one word—not even those which were transfigured into swear words—contains the slightest tonic virtue. Language outlives itself, a long and pitiable despair. The principle of anemia it conceals is one whose baleful influence we nonetheless still suffer from today.

The blood's mode of expression, screaming, on the other hand, arouses us, fortifies us, and sometimes cures us when we are lucky enough to give ourselves up to it. We immediately feel close to our distant ancestors, who must have howled incessantly in their caves, including those who daubed the walls. At the antipodes of those happy days, we are reduced to living in a society so badly organized that the only place where we can scream with impunity is the lunatic asylum. Thus is forbidden to us the sole method we have of ridding ourselves of the horror of others and of the horror of ourselves.

If there were at least books of consolation... very few exist, for the good reason that there is no consolation, and can be none, so long as we do not shake off the chains of lucidity and decorum. The man who contains himself, who masters himself on every occasion—the distinguished man, as we call him—is virtually a nervous wreck. The same is true of anyone who suffers in silence. If we seek a minimum of equilibrium, let us return to the scream; let us lose no opportunity to throw ourselves upon it or into it, and to proclaim its urgency.

Rage will help us, moreover—rage which proceeds from the very core of life. Hence, we shall not be surprised to find it particularly active in periods when health is identified with convulsion and chaos, in periods of religious innovation. There is no compatibility between religion and wisdom. Religion is swaggering, aggressive, unscrupulous; it advances and is embarrassed by nothing. The admirable thing about it is that it condescends to favor our lowest sentiments; otherwise, it would not have so profound a hold upon us. With religion, we can go, so to speak, as far as we like in any direction. Impure because it is integral with our vitality, it invites us to every excess and sets no limit to our euphoria nor to our downfall in God.

It is because wisdom possesses none of these advantages that it is so deadly to the man who seeks to manifest himself, to exercise his gifts. Wisdom is that continual ascesis we approach only by sabotaging whatever irreplaceable stocks of good and evil we possess. Wisdom leads nowhere; it is an impasse made into a discipline. Instead of ecstasy, which excuses and redeems all religions, what does it offer? A system of capitulations, restraint, abstention, withdrawal—not only from this, but from all worlds—a mineral serenity, a preference for petrifaction out of fear of both pleasure and pain.

Next to Epictetus, any saint, Christian or otherwise, looks like a madman. Saints are of feverish and histrionic temperaments who seduce and involve us. They flatter our weaknesses by the very violence with which they denounce us; moreover, they give us the impression that we can reach some understanding with them—a minimum of extravagance or cunning would do the trick. With the sages, on the contrary, neither compromise nor risk is possible. They find rage odious, reject all its forms, and identify it with the source of aberrations.

"A source of energy, rather," thinks the man of depression, who clings to rage because he knows it is positive, dynamic, even if it turns against him. It is not in inertia that we commit suicide; it is in a fit of rage against ourselves. Ajax remains the typical suicide, in the exasperation of a sentiment which might be defined as follows: I can no longer bear to be disappointed by myself. This supreme spasm of disappointment, even if we anticipated it only at rare intervals, is one whose obsession would never leave us had we decided once and for all not to kill ourselves. If for many years a voice assured us we would not raise a hand against ourselves, that voice with age becomes less and less audible. The longer we live, the more we are at the mercy of some explosive silence.

The man who kills himself proves thereby that he might have killed others as well—that he even felt such an impulse but turned it against himself. And if he seems underhanded in doing so, it is because he follows the meanders of self-hatred and meditates with perfidious cruelty the blow to which he will succumb, not without having first reconsidered his birth, which he will forthwith lay under a curse.

It is our birth, in fact, that we must attend to if we want to extirpate the evil at its source. To abominate our birth is reasonable, yet difficult and unwanted. We take a stand against death, against what must come. Birth—a much more irreparable event—we leave to one side, pay little or no attention to it. To each man it appears as far in the past as the world's first moment. Only a man who plans to suppress himself reaches back that far. It seems he cannot forget the unnamable mechanism of procreation, and that he tries by a retrospective horror to annihilate the very seed from which he has sprung.

Inventive and enterprising, the rage for self-destruction does not confine itself to wresting only individuals from torpor; it seizes upon entire nations as well and lets them renew themselves by compelling them to act in flagrant contradiction to their traditions. A nation which seemed to be proceeding towards sclerosis was actually heading for catastrophe, and helped itself to do so by means of the very mission it had undertaken. To doubt the necessity of disaster is to resign oneself to consternation; it is to make it impossible for oneself to understand the vogue fatality assumes at certain moments. The key to all that is inexplicable in history may well be found in such rage against oneself, in the terror of satiety and repetition, in the fact that man will always prefer the unheard-of to routine.

The phenomenon is also conceivable on the scale of whole species. How could so many have disappeared by the mere caprice of climate? Is it not likely that after millions and millions of years, the great mammals finally wearied of wandering the globe? That they reached that degree of explosive lassitude where instinct, competing with consciousness, sides against itself? Whatever lives asserts and denies itself in frenzy. To let oneself die is a sign of weakness; to annihilate oneself, of strength. Worst of all is the collapse into that condition where we cannot even imagine the desire to destroy ourselves.

It is paradoxical and perhaps improper to prosecute indifference after having implored it so long for the peace and the incuriosity of the corpse. Why draw back when at last it begins to oblige, and when it still preserves the same prestige for us? Is it not a betrayal to turn against the idol we have venerated most of all? Certainly, there is an element of happiness in any reversal; any about-face affords an increase in vigor. Denials rejuvenate, our strength being measured by the sum of beliefs we have abjured. Each of us should end his career as a deserter from every cause.

If, despite the enthusiasm with which it has inspired us, indifference ends by alarming us, by seeming intolerable, this is precisely because, by suspending the course of our desertions, it attacks the very principle of our being and prevents its expansion. Perhaps it has a negative essence we failed to guard against in time; by adopting it without reservation, we could not avoid those pangs of radical incuriosity—an abyss into which no one plunges without emerging unrecognizable. The man who has merely glimpsed those depths no longer aspires to resemble the dead, nor to gaze as they do elsewhere, at something else, anything else except appearance. What he wants is to return to the living and to recover among them his old miseries, which he has trodden underfoot in his progress toward detachment.

We lose our way following in the footsteps of a sage if we are not one ourselves. Sooner or later we weary, we turn aside, we break with him—if only out of the passion for breaking. We declare war on him as we do on everything, beginning with the ideal we have not been able to realize. Having invoked Pyrrho and his like for years, is it admissible to betray them when we are more imbued with their teaching than ever? But are we really betraying them? Can we presume to regard ourselves as their victim when we can blame them for nothing but being right? It is not comfortable, the condition of a man who, having asked wisdom to free him from himself and the world, comes to the point of detesting it, of finding it merely one shackle more.

EC