Very woman (Sixtine) : $b a cerebral novelGourmont, Remy de
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Very woman (Sixtine) : $b a cerebral novel
Gourmont, Remy de
French fiction -- Translations into English
It had often happened to him that his revery intervened in the active
series and broke its determination; such a result, certainly, no longer
filled him with childish astonishments, but this time there was a truly
marvelous subordination of the fact to the idea. This was the theme:
faithless to a beloved Dead, A desires another woman, who yields and
gives herself to him; but, at the moment of possession, the beloved
Dead woman appears to him, in certain conditions to be developed,
and the old love vanquishes the new. This outline, with some linear
modifications, could symbolically have characterized the unexpected
events of his night with Valentine. Presentiment and coincidence did
not explain such an occurrence and, moreover, such an occurrence was
the hundredth he had observed. Hence the conception of a possible
event had brought it into his life, conditioned by the intervention of
an external will, adapted to the vital limits of time and space, but
recognizable in its constituent and original elements. It was worth
reflecting upon: it was a whole corner of the yet unknown psychology,
a whole order of phenomena as curious, for example, as the fact of
suggestion so bungled by official hypnotizers, who lack philosophic
understanding. This could even be classed under the chapter of
suggestions; but if, in things of this kind, one knew the suggester,
the person to whom a thing was suggested would escape. Nor was it a
matter of a will dimly or even unconsciously domineered by another
will; there was rather, as a point of departure, a will seeking to
bring about the wholly ideal and wholly subjective accomplishment
of a thing. But how could this will act upon the immutable order of
things? Since the suggester found himself, in the case of the person
subject to his will, in the second state, was it not merely a case
of auto-suggestion? Then, too, it was necessary to explain how the
subjected person could bring over, into his orb, wills and facts
external to himself and how, in sustaining an order suggested by his
mental activity, he could make it submit to all its relationships
of things and beings. Idealism unveiled these dim arcana for him.
Assuredly the thinking person dominates those who do not think, and the
man who wills, though unwittingly, the realization, though ideal, of a
group of facts, dominates all wills which, unwarned, are not on guard,
finding themselves unprepared to oppose will with will. The material
and unconscious world lives and moves only in the intelligence which
perceives and recreates it anew according to personal forms; there is
as much of the thinking world as a superior intelligence unites and
fashions to his wish. The conflict is only among superiorities, and the
rest, the herd, follows the masters, willy-nilly: ah! revolt is quite
useless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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