His eyes darted first one way then the other, moving in short, explosive bursts. He seemed nervous, full of energy, anxious to get to what he wanted to say, and yet still not quite certain how to begin. He had turned his head to the side, casting a long glance at the empty shelves, seeing in his mind the exact titled sequence of each volume they had once contained. Suddenly he jerked backward and studied Hart with what seemed a new interest.
“How old are you?-Never mind! In your forties; you still have the excuse of your youth.” He pushed the manuscript across to Hart. “I don’t know if you will understand it; I don’t care if you believe it. But take it, read it, study it, think about it, let it settle in your mind, then work your way through it again.”
Jean Valette sat as if frozen to the spot, and then, an instant later, laughed out loud. He jumped out of the chair and threw up his hands.
“No one understands, no one has any idea what I’m talking about! No one has seen the things I’ve seen, things that have not happened yet, but that I know as well as anything I know about the past!”
He began to talk faster and faster, trying to explain, and then, without so much as a moment’s pause, lapsing into a long flight of French, and he was not talking to Hart anymore, he was talking to himself, taunting himself with knowing things he could not explain, not if he had a hundred years to try. The world was mad, or he was-there was no middle ground. His eyes grew wide-whether with wonder at what he saw, or rage at what he could not make anyone see-and then, as his eyes rolled higher in his head, his jaw tightened and began to tremble, and he pounded both fists so hard on the desk that the lamp would have fallen over if Hart had not caught it and put it back.
“Read it!” he implored. “Whenever you can, whenever you want,” he went on, quickly coming back to himself. “You might be-no, I’m certain of it: You’ll understand enough of it, the broad outline, to grasp the main intention.”
Wrapping his arms around himself, he began to pace back and forth. There was a slightly puzzled expression on his face and a kind of laughing awareness of it in his eyes. From a sideways angle, he glimpsed Hart, who wore a puzzled expression of a different kind.
“I need to be careful. It’s a curious change of phrase, don’t you think, to say on the one hand that someone is out of his mind, and to say on the other that someone has lost his mind. Lost it, out of it-the real danger is to live too much inside it.” He stopped pacing and as if he had just remembered something of great importance, faced Hart directly. “I need to be careful that I don’t end up like him.”
Hart had no idea whom he was talking about.
“There is a marvelous description that when I first read it thought might one day, if I worked hard enough, be written about me. I do not, you understand, put myself in the same category, but precisely for that reason the danger is perhaps even greater.
“‘Nietzsche sought, by a new beginning, to retrieve antiquity from the emptiness of modernity and, with this experiment, vanished in the darkness of insanity.’
“He saw what would happen in the twentieth century and it drove him mad. I see what is going to happen in the twenty-first century, and perhaps with the same result. Read what I have written. You may think I’ve already gone mad. But I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.”
Jean Valette sat down, took a deep breath, and, as it seemed, caught his balance.
“‘God is dead.’ You’ve heard that phrase. Do you know what it means? It isn’t simply a denial of the existence of the Christian God: it is the greatest event in the life of man, the ultimate crisis in human history. The death of God means the death of belief in anything worth looking up to. It means the ‘last man,’ the man who has ceased to aspire, the man who no longer knows anything heroic, any dedication, any reverence. The last man: everyone wills the same thing, everyone is the same, everyone is equal, the perfect conformity of perfect mediocrity in which everyone is satisfied; worse because no one knows, no one remembers that there is anything else, that there is a difference between better and worse. It is the world in which we live now, the only acceptable, the only legitimate objective, comfortable self-preservation in which all anxieties are removed, or at least treated, by pharmaceuticals and therapy.”
“You paint a fairly bleak picture. Most people aren’t quite that pessimistic,” replied Hart. Even as he said it, he felt a tinge of embarrassment, a sense that he was repeating something that he did not quite believe.
“The people in the picture never see themselves, do they? Only someone outside it knows what they are really like, and how much better they could be. That’s what I’m trying to tell you-what I tried to write: the West is in a crisis and it doesn’t know it. The West has forgotten what it stands for, has forgotten what it believes, or used to believe, because of course now it does not believe in anything, except its own superiority to everything that preceded it, every age that believed in something worth dying for. The situation is very simple: The West does not believe in anything and Islam, like Christianity and even modern science, believes in something that is not true: that the world came into being and must therefore have an end. Isn’t that what both Christianity and evolution teach: that, whether it happened in six days or millions of years, human beings were created by something that was not human, and that nothing we do here on earth has any great importance?
“This isn’t what we used to think, before Christianity and the other revealed religions taught us to despise the notion that the work of humanity was to achieve, try to achieve, the perfection, the excellence, intended by nature. Read Plato, read Aristotle, read more than a thousand years later Maimonides; discover the ancient guarded secret that everything that comes into being, including all human individuals, pass out of being, but that the world itself is eternal. But start with Aristotle, read in the Metaphysics the passage where at the conclusion of several hundred tightly reasoned pages he concludes that change has ‘always been. And so with time… Accordingly, change is as continuous as time; for time is either the same as change or is in the same way bound up with it. But there is no continuous change except locomotion, and no continuous locomotion except cyclical.’ I think I remember that right.
“It is the only hope we have: to go all the way back to the beginning if we are going to see our way clearly ahead. That’s why I wrote what I did, what I hope you will read; that’s why I started the school, the academy, so that sometime in the next generation there might be a few men and women who understand the fallacies of the modern age, and the need for a new religion. That’s why I did what I did with Constable and the others, so there might be someone in a position of authority and power who could at least start to change directions. That’s why I chose you, Mr. Hart: because there is more to you than ambition.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
David Allen had barely slept in three days. He tried to relax, he tried to tell himself that every crisis had an end, he even tried sleeping pills, but nothing worked; nothing could stop the frenzied, thousand thoughts a minute movement of his mind, the compulsion to try to find answers to questions he did not know how to ask. His blood pressure, always high, was off the charts; the thumping in his chest was loud enough to hear. He began to have a nervous tic at the corner of his mouth. Without warning, a quick incessant blinking would suddenly take possession of his tired eyes. Like the world around him, everything was going to extremes.