Maldoror and Poems (Classics) by Lautreamont Comte

Author:Lautreamont, Comte [Lautreamont, Comte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140443424
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTH BOOK

1

A MAN, a stone, or a tree is going to begin this fourth song. When the foot slips on a frog which it has crushed, one has a feeling of disgust; but when one merely brushes against the human body with one’s hand, the skin of one’s fingers cracks like fragments of a block of mica smashed by hammer-blows; and just as, on ship’s deck, the heart of a shark, though it has been dead for an hour, goes on beating with dogged vitality, so too our entrails are stirred to the depths long after that touch. Such is the horror which man inspires in his fellow-beings! Perhaps in suggesting this I am mistaken; but it may be that I am right. I know, I can conceive of a malady more terrible than the puffiness of the eyes which comes from long hours of meditation on the strange character of man: but I am still seeking it… and I have not been able to find it! I do not think I am less intelligent than the next man, but who would dare to declare that I have succeeded in my investigations? What a lie his lips would be telling! The ancient temple of Denderah is one and a half hours’ journey from the left bank of the Nile. Today countless swarms of wasps have taken possession of its gutters and cornices. They fly around the columns like the thick waves of a head of black hair. Sole inhabitants of the cold porch, they guard the entrance to the vestibule as if it were a hereditary right. I compare the buzzing of their metallic wings to the incessant crashing of ice-floes flung against one another when the ice breaks up in polar seas. But when I consider the conduct of him whom providence gave the throne of this earth, the three pinions of my sorrow make a far louder hum! When, after eighty years’ absence, a comet reappears in some part of the heavens, it displays its brilliant nebulous trail for men and for crickets to behold. No doubt it is unaware of this long journey; the same is not true of me: sitting up in bed while the jagged shapes of a gloomy and arid horizon loom up in force from the depths of my soul, I give myself up to dreams of compassion, and I blush for man! The sailor, cut by the blasts of the north wind, hurries back to his hammock when he has finished his night watch: why am I not granted this consolation? The thought that I have wilfully fallen as low as my fellow-beings, that I have less right than the next man to bewail our fate, which remains shackled to the hardened crust of a planet, or the essence of our perverse souls, pierces me like a massive nail. We have seen whole families wiped out by fire-damp explosions; but the pain they felt must have been short, since death is almost instantaneous, amid the ruins and the noxious gases… I… I still exist, like basalt.

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