Chapter 5 : Part 4

The Unknown Guest
by Maurice Maeterlinck

(Page 9 of 11)

It saves us from a danger by imparting to our limbs unforeseen and unerring movements and actions which they had never made before and which are contrary to those which they had been taught to make: it knows that the hour has not yet come when it will be useless to defend ourselves. It chooses our love in spite of the revolt of our intelligence or of our poor, ephemeral heart. It smiles when we are frightened and sometimes it is frightened when we smile. And it is always the winner, humiliating our reason, crushing our wisdom and silencing arguments and passions alike with the contemptuous hand of destiny. The greatest doctors surround our sick-bed and deceive themselves and us in foretelling our death or our recovery: it alone whispers in our car the truth that will not be denied.

A thousand apparently mortal blows fall upon our head and not a lash of its eyelids quivers; but suddenly a tiny shock, which our senses had not even transmitted to our brain, wakes it with a start. It sits up, looks around and understands. It has seen the crack in the vault that separates the two lives. It gives the signal for departure. Forthwith panic spreads from cell to cell; and the innumerous city that we are utters yells of horror and distress and hustles around the gates of death.

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That great figure, that new being has been there, in our darkness, from all time, though its awkward and extravagant actions, until recently attributed to the gods, the demons or the dead, am only now asking for our serious attention. It has been likened to an immense block of which our personality is but a diminutive facet; to an iceberg of which we see a few glistening prisms that represent our life, while nine-tenths of the enormous mass remain buried in the shadows of the sea. According to Sir Oliver Lodge, it is that part of our being that has not become carnate; according to Gustave Le Bon, it is the "condensed" soul of our ancestors, which is true, beyond a doubt, but only a part of the truth, for we find in it also the soul of the future and probably of many other forces which are not necessarily human. William James saw in it a diffuse cosmic consciousness and the chance intrusion into our scientifically organized world of remnants and bestiges of the primordial chaos.

Here are a number of images striving to give us an idea of a reality so vast that we are unable to grasp it. It is certain that what we see from our terrestrial life is nothing compared with what we do not see. Besides, if we think of it, it would be monstrous and inexplicable that we should be only what we appear to be, nothing but ourselves, whole and complete in ourselves, separated, isolated, circumscribed by our body, our mind, our consciousness, our birth and our death. We become possible and probable only on the conditions that we project beyond ourselves on every side and that we stretch in every direction throughout time and space.

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But how shall we explain the incredible contrast between the immeasurable grandeur of our unknown guest, the assurance, the calmness, the gravity of the inner life which it leads in us and the puerile and sometimes grotesque incongruities of what one might call its public existence? Inside us, it is the sovereign judge, the supreme arbiter, the prophet, almost the god omnipotent; outside us, from the moment that it quits its shelter and manifests itself in external actions, it is nothing more than a fortune-teller, a bone-setter, a sort of facetious conjuror or telephone-operator, I was on the verge of saying a mountebank or clown.

At what particular instant is it really itself? Is it seized with giddiness when it leaves its lair? Is it we who no longer hear it, who no longer understand it, as soon as it ceases to speak in a whisper and to act in the dark recesses of our life? Are we in regard to it the terrified hive invaded by a huge and inexplicable hand, the maddened ant-hill trampled by a colossal and incomprehensible foot? Let us not venture yet to solve the strange riddle with the aid of the little that we know. Let us confine ourselves, for the moment, to noting on the way some other, rather easier questions which we can at least try to answer.

First of all, are the facts at issue really new? Was it only yesterday that the existence of our unknown guest and its external manifestations were revealed to us? Is it our attention that makes them appear more numerous, or is it the increase in their number that at last attracts out attention?

It does indeed seem that, however far we go back in history, we everywhere find the same extraordinary phenomena, under other names and often in a more glamorous setting. Oracles, prophecies, incantations, haruspication, "possession," evocation of the dead, apparitions, ghosts, miraculous cures, levitation, transmission of thought, apparent resurrections and the rest are the exact equivalent, though magnified by the aid of plentiful and obvious frauds of our latter-day supernaturalism. Turning in another direction, we are able to see that psychical phenomena are very evenly distributed over the whole surface of the globe. At all events, there does not appear to be any race that is absolutely or peculiarly refractory to them.

One would be inclined to say, however, that they manifest themselves by preference among the most civilized nations - perhaps because that is where they are most carefully sought after - and among the most primitive. In short, it cannot be denied that we are in the presence of faculties or senses, more or less latent but at the same time universally distributed, which form part of the general and unvarying inheritance of mankind. But have these faculties or senses undergone evolution, like most of the others? And, if they have not done so on our earth, do they show traces of an extraplanetary evolution? Is there progress or reaction? Are they withered and useless branches, or buds swollen with sap and promise? Are they retreating before the march of intelligence or invading its domain?

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M. Ernest Bozzano, one of the most learned, most daring and most subtle exponents of the new science that is in process of formation, in the course of a remarkable essay in the Annales des sciences psychiques, gives it as his opinion that they have remained stationary and unchanged. He considers that they have become in no way diffused, generalized and refined, like so many others that are much less important and useful from the point of view of the struggle for life, such as the musical faculty, for instance. It does not even seem, says M. Bozzano, that it is possible to cultivate or develop them systematically. The Hindu race in particular, who for thousands of years have been devoting themselves to the study of these manifestations, have arrived at nothing but a better knowledge of the empirical methods calculated to produce them in individuals already endowed with these supernormal faculties. I do not know to what extent M. Bozzano's assertions are beyond dispute.

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.