Solitude

After a merry dinner in a bachelor’s company, my old friend said to me:

“Don’t you want to stroll along the Champs-Élysées?”

And we set off, walking slowly along the long avenue between the trees, thinly clothed in foliage. Not the slightest noise except that eternal muffled rumble from the ceaseless Parisian traffic. A fresh breeze blew in our faces, and across the dark sky was scattered the golden dust of innumerable stars.

My companion began to speak:

“I don’t know why, but at night I breathe more freely here than anywhere else. My thought seems to grow. At moments my mind is illuminated by bright flashes of light, and in these moments it seems to me that we shall guess the divine mystery of life. But then the window slams shut… And it’s over.”

From time to time double shadows flickered between the trees; we passed a bench; a couple sitting side by side on it merged into one dark spot.

My friend said:

“Pitiful people! Not disgust but boundless pity do I feel for them. Of all the mysteries of human life I have grasped only one: the torture of our existence lies in the fact that we are eternally alone, and everything we do we do to escape from this loneliness. And these loving couples on benches under the open sky are seeking the possibility, as we are, as all living beings are, to escape even for a moment from their loneliness—but they remain and will eternally remain alone; and so will we.

“Some people feel this more strongly, others more weakly—that is all.

“For some time I have experienced unbearable torture: I have understood, I have grasped my terrible loneliness, and I know that nothing—do you understand?—nothing in the world can put an end to it. All our attempts, our efforts, our heart’s impulses, all the calls of our lips, all our embraces are vain and vain—we are always alone.

“I brought you here, on this walk, so as not to go home—the loneliness of my apartment now torments me unbearably. But even this is no use. I speak, you listen, we walk together, side by side, but each of us is alone. Do you understand me?

“‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ says the scripture. These have not lost the phantom of happiness. They do not know our grief of loneliness; they do not wander through the path of life as I do, touching people only with their elbows, with no other joy than the egoistic satisfaction of understanding, seeing, guessing, and suffering endlessly from the consciousness of their eternal loneliness.

“You think I’ve gone mad. Don’t you?

“But hear me out. Since I felt the loneliness of my existence, it seems to me that with each day I sink deeper and deeper into some dark underground chamber, whose edges and end I do not see and from which there may be no exit. I walk through it, but neither with me nor beside me is there a single living being. The underground chamber is our life. Sometimes I hear noise, voices, cries… Groping, I hurry toward them. But from where they come I never know for certain; I meet no one, I do not find the hand of another person in the darkness that surrounds me. Do you understand?

“There were people who sometimes guessed this terrible suffering. Musset exclaimed:

Who goes there? Is someone calling me?—No one. I am alone, as always—the hour has struck. O loneliness! O poverty!

“But with him this was a fleeting doubt, not complete certainty as with me. He was a poet; he filled life with phantoms, dreams. He was never entirely alone, as I am.

“Gustave Flaubert, that great unhappy one of this world—because he was among the few great seers—wrote to a woman friend these desperate words: ‘We are all in the desert; no one understands anyone.’

“Yes, no one understands anyone; whatever we think, whatever we say, whatever we do—no one understands anyone. Does the earth know what happens on those stars scattered like fiery seeds in space, so far away that we see only the most insignificant part of them, while the rest of their countless hosts are lost in infinity? Yet perhaps these stars are so close to each other that they form one whole, like the molecules of a single body?

“And as the earth does not know what happens on those stars, so a person does not know what happens in another person. We are farther from each other than those heavenly bodies, and above all, more separated, because thought is bottomless.

“What can be more terrible than this constant contact with beings while being unable to merge with them? We love as if we were chained close to one another, and, stretching out our hands, we cannot join. The tormenting need for union gnaws at us; but all our efforts are vain, our impulses fruitless, our outpourings useless, our embraces powerless, our caresses empty. We want to merge, but for all our strivings, we only bump against each other. I feel myself most alone when I give my heart to another person: then this impossibility becomes even more evident to me. There he is—this person—he looks at me with his clear eyes, but his soul, behind them, I do not know. He listens to me. But what is he thinking? Yes, what is he thinking? Don’t you understand this torment? Perhaps he hates me, despises me, mocks me? He weighs all my words, judges me, jeers, condemns me, considers me a mediocrity or a fool? How can I know what he thinks? How can I know if he loves me as I love him, and what stirs in his little round head? What a terrible mystery—the unknown thought of another being, thought that is hidden and free, which we can neither know, nor direct, nor restrain, nor conquer.

“And I?.. However much I try to give myself, to open all the doors of my soul—I cannot. Always at the bottom, at the very bottom, there remains a secret corner of my ‘I’ where no one penetrates. No one can open it, enter there, because no one is like me, and no one understands anyone.

“At least at this moment, do you understand me?—No. You think me mad! You are examining me, you are on your guard against me! You ask yourself: what’s wrong with him? But if ever you succeed in understanding my terrible and refined suffering, oh, come then just to say: ‘I understood you’—and for a moment I shall be happy.

“Women especially make me feel my loneliness more strongly.

“Oh, woe, woe! How I have suffered from them! More often than men they aroused in me the false hope that I was not alone.

“When you enter into love, it seems that you expand, you are seized by an inhuman bliss. Do you know why? Do you know the source of this sensation of immense happiness? Solely because you imagine yourself no longer alone. Loneliness, the estrangement of the human being, seems to have ended. What a pitiful delusion!

“A woman suffers even more than we from that eternal need for love that gnaws at our lonely heart; and it is this woman who constitutes the main lie of the dream.

“You know those sweet hours face to face with this being, long-haired, captivating, whose glances alone drive us mad. A mad rapture clouds the mind! What a wonderful illusion seizes us! It seems that she and I are about to merge into one. But this only seems so, and after weeks of expectations, hopes, and false joys, I feel myself even more alone than before.

“After each kiss, after each embrace, loneliness grows. And how terrible it is, how tormenting! The poet Sully Prudhomme says:

All caresses are but mad impulses, Fruitless attempts of pitiful love To achieve by the union of bodies the impossible fusion of souls.

“And then farewell. It is all over! We barely recognize the woman who for a moment was everything to us and whose innermost thought, certainly banal, we never even knew.

“Even in those moments when it seems to us that in the mysterious accord of our beings, in the complete mingling of desires and all strivings, we have penetrated to the very depth of her soul—a word, a single word accidentally spoken by her, reveals our self-deception and, like lightning at night, illuminates the abyss lying between us.

“And yet there is nothing better than those evenings with a beloved woman—silent evenings when you feel yourself almost happy just from her presence. Let us not demand more, because never will two beings merge together!

“As for me, I have now locked my soul away from everyone. I tell no one what I believe, what I think, what I love. Knowing that I am condemned to terrible loneliness, I look indifferently at everything and do not speak my mind. What do I care about other people’s opinions, quarrels, pleasures, and beliefs? Not being able to share anything with people, I am indifferent to everything. My invisible thought remains unexplored. I have banal phrases in answer to everyday questions and a smile when I don’t want to answer.

“Do you understand me?”

We had walked the whole length of the long avenue to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, descended to the Place de la Concorde; he spoke slowly and said much else that I did not even remember.

Finally he stopped before the granite obelisk standing on the Parisian pavement. By the light of the stars the long Egyptian profile of this monument in exile was barely outlined, on whose sides the history of its country is inscribed in strange symbols. And suddenly, with a wave of his hand, my friend pointed to this obelisk and exclaimed:

“We are all like this stone!”

And he walked away without saying another word.

Whether he was drunk, mad, or wise, I still do not know. Sometimes it seems to me he was right; sometimes—that he was mad.

—Guy de Maupassant

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Translator’s Notes:

• Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was a French writer famous for his short stories and novels. He struggled with mental illness in his later years, dying in an asylum, which adds poignancy to this meditation on isolation and the unknowability of other minds.
• The Champs-Élysées is the famous avenue in Paris leading from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe.
• Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) was a French Romantic poet. The verses quoted are from his poem “Nuit de décembre” (December Night).
• Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was the author of Madame Bovary and a literary mentor and friend to Maupassant. The quote about being “in the desert” is from his correspondence.
• Sully Prudhomme (1839–1907) was a French poet and the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1901). The verses are from his philosophical poetry.
• The Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde was a gift from Egypt to France in 1829. Its “exile” from its homeland serves as the final image of alienation.
• This piece represents a kind of existentialism avant la lettre—the themes of radical isolation, the impossibility of true communication, and the ultimate unknowability of other consciousnesses would later be central to thinkers like Sartre and Camus.
• Tolstoy’s inclusion of this profoundly pessimistic piece is somewhat surprising given his own emphasis on the possibility of spiritual connection through love of God and neighbor. Perhaps he valued it as an honest statement of the problem to which faith is the answer.