Chapter 5 : Part 2

The Unknown Guest
by Maurice Maeterlinck

(Page 7 of 11)

We see, it has a reply to everything, it takes every name that we wish and there is nothing to limit it, because it lives in a world wherein bounds are as illusory as the useless words which we employ on earth.

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While it has a reply to everything, certain manifestations which it deliberately ascribes to the spirits have brought upon it a not undeserved reproach. To begin with, as Dr. Maxwell observes, it has no absolutely fixed doctrine. In nearly every country in the world, when it speaks in the name of the spirits, it declares that they undergo reincarnation and readily relates their past existences. In England, on the contrary, it usually asserts that they do not become reincarnated. What does this mean? Surely this ignorance or this inconsistency on the part of that which appears to know everything is very strange! And worse, sometimes it attributes to the spirits, sometimes to itself or any one or anything the revelations which it makes to us.

When exactly is it speaking the truth? At least on two occasions out of three, it deludes itself or deludes us. If it deceive itself, if it is mistaken about a matter in which it should be easy for it to know the truth, what can it teach us on the subject of a world of whose most elementary laws it is ignorant, since it does not even know whether it is itself or another that speaks to us in the name of that world? Are we to believe that it was in the same darkness as our poor superficial ego, which it pretends so often to enlighten and which it does in fact inspire in most of the great events of life? If it deceives us, why does it do so? We can see no object: it asks for nothing, not for alms, nor prayers, nor thoughts, on behalf of those whose mantle it assumes for the sole purpose of leading us astray. What is the use of those mischievous and puerile pranks, of those ghastly graveyard pleasantries? It must lie then for the mere pleasure of lying; and our unknown guest, that infinite and doubtless immortal subconsciousness in which we have placed out last hopes, is after all but an imbecile, a buffoon or a rank swindler!

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I do not believe that the truth is as hideous as this. Our unknown guest does not deceive itself any more than it deceives us; but it is we who deceive ourselves. It has not the stage to itself; and its voice is not the voice that sounds in our ears, which were never made to catch the echoes of a world that is not like ours. If it could speak to us itself and tell us what it knows, we should probably at that instant cease to be on this earth. But we are immersed in our bodies, entombed prisoners with whom it cannot communicate at will. It roams around the walls, it utters warning cries. It knocks at every door, but all that reaches us is a vague disquiet, an indistinct murmur that is sometimes translated to us by a half-awakened gaoler who, like ourselves, is a lifelong captive. The gaoler does his best; he has his own way of speaking, his familiar expressions; he knows, and, with the aid of the words which he possesses and those which he hears repeated, he tries to make us understand what he hardly understands himself. He does not know exactly whence the sounds come which he hears; and, according as tempests, wars or riots happen to be uppermost at the moment, he attributes them to the winds, to tramping soldiers or to frenzied crowds.

In other words and speaking without metaphor, it is the medium who draws from his habitual language and from that suggested to him by his audience the wherewithal to clothe and identify the strange presentiments, the unfamiliar visions that come from some unknown region. If he believes that the dead survive, he will naturally imagine that it is the dead who speak to him. If he has a favourite spirit, angel, demon or god, he will express himself in its name; if he has no preconceived opinion, he will not even allude to the origin of the revelations which he is making.

The inarticulate language of the subconsciousness necessarily borrows that of the normal consciousness; and the two become confused into a sort of shifting and multiform jargon. And our unknown guest, which is not thinking of delivering a course of lectures upon its entity, but simply giving us as best it can a more or less warning or mark of its existence, seems to care but little as to the garments in which it is rigged out, having indeed no choice in the matter, for, either because it is unable to manifest itself or because we are incapable of understanding it, it has to be content with whatever comes to hand.

Besides, if we attribute too exclusively to the spirits that which comes from another quarter, the mistake is doubtless no great one in its eyes; for it is not madness to believe that it lives with that which does not die in the dead even as with that which does not die in ourselves, with that which does not descend into the grave even as with that which does not take flesh at the hour of birth.

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There is no reason therefore to condemn the other theories entirely. Most of them doubtless contain something more than a particle of truth; in particular, the great quarrel between the subconscious school and the spiritualists is based on the whole upon a misunderstanding. It is quite possible and even very probable that the dead are all around us, since it is impossible that the dead do not live. Our subconsciousness must mingle with all that does not die in them; and that which dies in them or rather disperses and loses all its importance is but the little consciousness accumulated on this earth and kept up until the last hour by the frail bonds of memory. In all those manifestations of our unknown guest, it is our posthumous ego that already lives in us while we are still in the flesh and at moments joins that which does not die in those who have quitted their body. Then does the existence of our unknown guest presume the immortality of a part of ourselves?

Can one possibly doubt it? Have you ever imagined that you would perish entirely? As for me, what I cannot picture is the manner in which you would picture that total annihilation. But, if you cannot perish entirely, it is no less certain that those who came before you have not perished either; and hence it is not altogether improbable that we may be able to discover them and to communicate with them. In this wider sense, the spiritualistic theory is perfectly admissible; but what is not at all admissible is the narrow and pitiful interpretation which its proponents too often give it.

About the Author

Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 - May 6, 1949) was a Belgian poet, playwright, and essayist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life.