What are you looking for in the cemetery? There’s nothing there but old clothes and old boxes. The dead are elsewhere; some in paradise, some in purgatory, others in hell. And where are these places? On earth, around you.
All living human beings are the dead living again; they have all emerged from an old envelope with a body grown young again; all drag memories at least as old as the red Pleistocene clay through which they drive a plough. Every human being is the seed of a human being who grew to maturity; every seed was a part of a human being before becoming a human being. All that is a human being now has been alive for an almost unimaginable time, since very simple organisms were born in the sea. Let’s not try to evaluate how old we are when we are born; we’d soon be out of our depth.
So we drag a very old life along, some in the paradise of dawn light, others in the mists of purgatory, others in the fires of hell; all under the same sun and the same stars, but not all with the same eyes. If there are just persons in the world, with no regrets nor hate in their hearts, but only a noble love which delivers them from themselves, then yes, they really are in paradise; for them the sun is always beautiful and the stars, and the clouds, the babbling brook and the furious sea. But how to describe this joy which brings light to the world? Even Dante painted a paradise that was too pale, because he saw it from the bottom of hell. If we could return to first childhood, by letting the wind shake off the years and the mistakes, perhaps we would find that lost paradise.
As for me, I have only encountered souls in purgatory, attached, even the better ones, to pleasures they don’t value; always struggling with the hydra; always emptying their bag with one hand, filling it with the other; always thieves against theft, liars for the good, angry with anger, and brave out of fear. Good day, my friends. The light is above the clouds, but the road winds, hardly climbing at all. What are they doing? They light a fire and warm themselves; but they don’t come to believe that this fire is the real sun.
Others light a fire and burn themselves. There are passions to which we must not give way and mistakes we must not make; for these passions fuel themselves like a raging fire; the more you drink, the more you will drink, and this weakness will drag you down from circle to circle, to the very bottom, like a weight at your neck. Then you would not even want to see the real sun of justice; you will say: it’s the fire of the passions which is the real sun; you will say that the just are dupes and that the most unjust injustice, the one which is triumphant, is the real good. When one has reached this point, perhaps all is lost. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Yes, and when you are reborn as a child, you will be even worse; you will be born ill or mad. That’s the last circle of hell.
Or even, perhaps, you will be saved by the love of a girl who will give you her paradise along with the rest. Average Adams and Eves will be born, and a new terrestrial paradise. The old sins will be buried in the earth; and the tempting serpent will bite his tail in despair.
10/11/08, Pleiade II, no. 83, p.108; P. d’un Normand, no. 974
English translation copyright © Michel Petheram