I was born in an era when most young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their fathers had once had it – without knowing why. And so, since the human spirit naturally tends to criticize because it feels, not because it thinks, most of those young people chose Humanity as a substitute for God. I belong, however, to that kind of men who stand on the margins of the world to which they belong, and who do not only look at the mass they belong to, but also towards the vast spaces on the side. For this reason, I have not completely abandoned God like they have, nor have I ever accepted Humanity. I have considered that God, although improbable, might also exist and that, therefore, one could worship Him; but that Humanity, being a mere biological idea and meaning nothing more than the human animal species, was no more worthy of worship than any other animal species. This cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, has always seemed to me a revival of ancient cults, in which animals were like gods, or the gods had animal heads. So, not knowing how to believe in God, and not being able to believe in a sum of animals, I remained, like others at the margins of peoples, at that distance from everything commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness; because unconsciousness is the foundation of life. The heart, if it could think, would stop. Thus, for those like me, who living do not know how to live, what remains but, like the few others similar to me, renunciation as a method and contemplation as an end? Not knowing what religious life is, nor being able to know it, because faith is not obtained through reason; unable to have faith in the abstraction of man, nor equally knowing what to do with it among us, nothing remained for us, by virtue of having a soul, but the aesthetic contemplation of life. And so, alien to the solemnity of all worlds, indifferent to the divine and disdainful of the human, we futilely give ourselves to purposeless sensations, cultivated in the subtlest epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves. Accepting from science only the fundamental precept, according to which everything is subject to the laws of fate, against which one cannot freely react, since reacting means those laws caused our reaction; and verifying how this precept fits with the other, older, of the divine fatality of things, we renounce effort like the weak renounce the exercises of athletes, and we bend over the book of sensations with the great scruple of heartfelt erudition. Taking nothing seriously, and considering that no other reality is given to us for certain than our sensations, we take refuge in them, and explore them like vast unknown lands. And if we persist diligently, not only in aesthetic contemplation but also in the expression of its modes and results, it is because the prose or verse we write, devoid of the purpose of influencing others’ intentions or stirring others’ will, are only like a pure act of reading aloud, done to give full objectivity to the subjective pleasure of reading. We know well that every work is necessarily imperfect, and that the least certain of our aesthetic contemplations will be the one about which we write. But everything is imperfect, there is no sunset so beautiful that it could not be more so, nor mild breeze inviting sleep that could not foster an even more serene sleep. And so, equal contemplators of mountains and statues, enjoying days like books, dreaming everything, above all, to transform it into our intimate substance, we will proceed also to descriptions and analyses, which, once done, will become strange things, which we can savor as if they reached us at dusk. This is not the conception of pessimists like De Vigny, who sees life as a prison, where one weaves straw to distract oneself. To be a pessimist means to take everything as tragic, and this attitude is an exaggeration and a nuisance. We certainly do not possess a concept of value to apply to the works we produce. We certainly produce them to distract ourselves: not like the prisoner weaving straw, so as not to think about Fate, but like the young girl embroidery cushions, to distract herself; nothing more. I consider life an inn, where I must stay until the arrival of the abyss’s stagecoach. I do not know where it will lead me, because I know nothing. I could consider this inn a prison, because I am forced to wait here; I could consider it a place to socialize, because here I find myself with others. I am, however, neither impatient nor naturally spontaneous. I leave to what I am those who shut themselves in the room, softly lying on the bed where they wait sleepless; I leave to what they do those who converse in the halls, whence music and voices easily reach me. I sit by the door and soak my eyes and ears with the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I sing softly, only for myself, vague songs I compose while waiting. For all of us the night will fall and the stagecoach will arrive. I enjoy the breeze that has been given to me and the soul that has been given to me to enjoy it, and I ask no other questions nor seek anything else. If what I will leave written in the book of guests, once re-read someday by someone, can entertain them in transit, it will be fine. If no one reads it, nor is entertained, it will be fine just the same.
