Death

Part 1

DEATH

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

New York Dodd, Mead & Company 1912

Copyright, 1911 By Maurice Maeterlinck Published, January, 1912

All rights reserved

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THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK IN UNIFORM STYLE AND BINDING

ESSAYS

THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE WISDOM AND DESTINY THE LIFE OF THE BEE THE BURIED TEMPLE THE DOUBLE GARDEN THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS DEATH

PLAYS

SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE JOYZELLE AND MONNA VANNA THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY MARY MAGDALENE PÉLLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS PRINCESS MALEINE THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE

HOLIDAY EDITIONS

The text in each case is an extract from one of the above mentioned books.

OUR FRIEND THE DOG OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS THE SWARM THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE FLOWERS CHRYSANTHEMUMS THE LEAF OF OLIVE THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK

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CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I OUR IDEA OF DEATH 3

II A PRIMITIVE IDEA 5

III WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OUR IDEA OF DEATH 10

IV WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICH GOES BEFORE 12

V THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE 14

VI THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN PROLONGING THE PANGS OF DEATH 17

VII THEIR ARGUMENTS 19

VIII THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO DEATH 21

IX THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO DO NOT BELONG TO DEATH 25

X WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN INTO WHICH DEATH HURLS US, LET US FIRST PUT RELIGIOUS FEARS FROM OUR MINDS 29

Part 2

XI ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE 33

XII THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS 37

XIII IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE 39

XIV THE SAME, CONTINUED 45

XV IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD NOT BE DREADFUL 48

XVI THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS 51

XVII THE SAME, CONTINUED 54

XVIII THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME A TORTURE 57

XIX A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY 60

XX THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH OUR MIND 65

XXI INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR REASON 68

XXII INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR SENSES 71

XXIII WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE KNOW? 74

XXIV THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT 77

XXV OUR FAITH IN INFINITY 81

XXVI THE SAME, CONTINUED 84

XXVII SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE? 87

XXVIII QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS? 90

XXIX THE SAME, CONTINUED 95

XXX IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER THEM 99

XXXI EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT FROM SUFFERING 102

DEATH

OUR IDEA OF DEATH

It has been well said:

"Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me--to me who am to die outright--of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!"

A PRIMITIVE IDEA

That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But, though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces, which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous--being the most persistent and the most inevitable--remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength, I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable. And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to lean, give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last moments. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.

III

Part 3

WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OUR IDEA OF DEATH

It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to learn to stand by it. He would say to death:

"I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is enough to prevent you from becoming my master."

He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried image against which the last agony would not prevail and in which the phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?

WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICH GOES BEFORE

"The doctors and the priests," said Napoleon, "have long been making death grievous."

Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it. Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They form part of life and not of death. We easily forget the most cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts an end to them.

THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE

In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the human soul has ever felt.

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