Hell by Henri Barbusse

Author:Henri Barbusse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turtle Point Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

I looked at what he was saying, and I looked at him: the sight which did not exist and the man who in the shadows scarcely existed any longer. The evocation and the man evoking it … I thought of that ineffable difference in grandeur which exists between him who thinks and what he thinks. His face is a tiny, vague, shadowy patch at the beginning of the unfolding of periods and countries.

More memories, and still more, came crowding in, piling up. I could tell that he was being assailed by a whole world, that he was a prey to too many memories: those he had stammered out, and those he hadn’t the leisure or the power to recount. He could not rid himself of the luminous grandeur that was in him.

He had thrown his head back; he had probably closed his eyes … And I could count and measure his memories, from the expression of suffering worn by a face which allowed itself to be looked at like that.

Now he who had gone into ecstasies a little earlier started complaining.

‘I remember … I remember … My heart has no pity for me.

‘Ah,’ he groaned immediately afterwards, with a gesture of resignation, ‘one can’t bid farewell to everything.’

She was there, and she could do nothing, although she was adored. She was helpless against that endless farewell which filled the man’s last glances. She could offer nothing but her beauty, her smile … And the superhuman vision was imbued in vain with regret, remorse, desire. He did not want it to be over. He was calling for what he had evoked; he wanted to take it back. He loved his past.

Inexorable, immobile, the past offers the characteristics of a divinity—because for those who believe as for those who deny, the supreme characteristic of God is to allow men to implore him.

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