Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/135

 another_.

The same silence as before seemed to swallow up this last cry. Clerambault lived outside of popular circles where he would have found the warm sympathy of simple, healthy minds. Not the slightest echo of his thought came to him.

He knew that he was not really alone, though he seemed so. Two apparently contradictory sentiments--his modesty and his faith--united to say to him: "What you thought, others have thought also; you are too small, this truth is too great, to exist only in you. The light that your weak eyes have seen has shone also for others. See where now the Great Bear inclines to the horizon,--millions of eyes are looking at it, perhaps; but you cannot see them, only the far-off light makes a bond between their sight and yours."

The solitude of the mind is only a painful delusion; it has no real existence, for even the most independent of us are members of a spiritual family. This community of spirit has no relation to time or space; its elements are dispersed among all peoples and all ages. Conservatives see them in the past, but the revolutionists and the persecuted look to the future for them. Past and future are not less real than the immediate present, which is a wall beyond which the calm eyes of the flock can see nothing. The present itself is not what the arbitrary divisions of states, nations, and religions would have us believe. In our time humanity is a bazaar of ideas, unsorted and thrown together in a heap, with hastily constructed partitions between them, so that brothers are separated from brothers, and thrown in with strangers. Every country has swallowed up different races, not formed to think and act together; so that each