Honore de Balzac "Shagreen Skin"
Cool piece. I read it a long time ago, but one thought that expresses (in my opinion) the philosophical essence of this short story is contained in the following quote:
A person exhausts himself with unaccountable actions, and because of them the sources of his existence dry up. All forms of these two causes of death are reduced to two verbs: to wish and to be able. Between these two limits of human activity there is another formula, which the sages possess, and to it I owe my happiness and longevity. To desire burns us, and to be able destroys us, but to know gives our weak body the opportunity to remain in a calm state forever. So, desire, or desire, is dead in me, killed by thought; action or power was reduced to satisfying the demands of my body. In short, I have centered my life not in a heart that can be broken, not in sensations that can become dull, but in a brain that does not wear out and survives everything. Excesses did not touch either my soul or body. Meanwhile, I looked around the whole world. I have walked on the highest mountains of Asia and America, I have learned all human languages, I have lived under all kinds of governments. I lent money to a Chinese, taking his father's corpse as collateral, I slept in an Arab's tent, trusting his word, I signed contracts in all European capitals and left my gold without fear in the wigwam of savages; in a word, I achieved everything, because I knew how to neglect everything. My only ambition was to see.
To see doesn’t it mean to know?.. And to know, young man, doesn’t it mean to enjoy intuitively? Doesn't this mean discovering the very essence of life and penetrating deeply into it? What remains of material possessions?
Just an idea. Judge, then, how wonderful must be the life of a man who, being able to imprint in his thought all realities, transfers the sources of happiness into his soul and extracts from them many ideal pleasures, cleansing them of all earthly filth. Thought is the key to all treasures; it gives you all the joys of a miser, but without his worries. And so I soared above the world, my pleasures were always spiritual joys. My feasts consisted of contemplating the seas, peoples, forests, mountains. I contemplated everything, but calmly, not knowing fatigue; I never wished for anything, I only expected. I walked through the universe as if through my own garden. What people call sadness, love, ambition, vicissitudes, grief - all these are for me only thoughts that I turn into dreams; instead of feeling them, I express them, I interpret them; instead of letting them consume my life, I dramatize them, I develop them; I amuse myself with them as if they were novels that I read with my inner vision. I never tire my body and therefore I am still in good health. Since my soul has inherited all the strength that I had not wasted, my head is richer than my warehouses. This is where,” he said, hitting himself on the forehead, “this is where the real millions are!” I spend my days delightfully: my eyes can see the past; I resurrect entire countries, pictures of different places, views of the ocean, beautiful images of history. I have an imaginary seraglio where I possess all the women who did not belong to me. Often I see your wars, your revolutions again and think about them. Oh, how can one prefer the feverish, fleeting admiration of some body, more or less blooming, forms, more or less round, how can one prefer the collapse of all your deceptive hopes - the high ability to create the universe in your soul; the boundless pleasure of moving without the entangling bonds of time, without the hindrances of space; pleasure - to embrace everything, to see everything, to bend over the edge of the world in order to question other spheres, to listen to God? Here,” he exclaimed in a thunderous voice, pointing to the shagreen skin, “we can and desire are united!” Here they are, your social ideas, your excessive desires, your intemperance, your joys that kill, your sorrows that force you to live too intense a life - after all, pain, perhaps, is nothing more than the utmost pleasure. Who could determine the boundary where voluptuousness becomes pain and where pain still remains voluptuousness? Don’t the liveliest rays of the ideal world caress the gaze, while the softest darkness of the physical world hurts it incessantly? Is it not from knowledge that wisdom is born? And what is madness if not the immensity of desire or power?
Shagreen skin - de Balzac Honore
Honore de Balzac
Shagreen leather
Mr. Savary, member of the Academy of Sciences
I. TALISMAN
At the end of October 1829, a young man entered the Palais Royal, just at the time when the gambling houses were opened, according to the law protecting the rights of passion, subject to taxation by its very nature. Without hesitation, he climbed the stairs of the brothel, which was marked with the number “36”.
- Would you like to give me my hat? - a deathly pale old man, who was perched somewhere in the shadows behind the barrier, sternly shouted to him, and then suddenly stood up and exposed his vile face.
When you enter a gambling house, the first thing the law does is take away your hat. Perhaps this is a kind of gospel parable, a warning sent from heaven, or rather a special kind of hellish contract that requires some kind of collateral from us? Perhaps they want to force you to respect those who beat you? Perhaps the police, penetrating all public sewers, want to know the name of your hatter or your own, if you wrote it on the lining of your hat? Or maybe they finally intend to take measurements from your skull so that they can then compile instructive statistical tables of the mental abilities of players? The administration remains completely silent on this matter. But keep in mind that as soon as you take the first step towards the green field, the hat no longer belongs to you, just as you do not belong to yourself: you are at the mercy of the game and you, and your wealth, and your hat, and your cane, and your cloak. And when you exit, the game returns to you what you deposited - that is, with a murderous, materialized epigram it will prove to you that it still leaves something for you. However, if you have a new headdress, then the lesson, the meaning of which is that the player should have a special costume, will cost you a pretty penny.
The bewilderment that appeared on the young man's face when he received a number in exchange for a hat, the brim of which, fortunately, was slightly frayed, indicated his inexperience; the old man, probably from a young age mired in the seething pleasures of excitement, looked at him with a dull, indifferent look, in which a philosopher would have discerned the squalor of a hospital, the wanderings of bankrupts, a string of drowned people, indefinite penal servitude, exile to Guasacoalco [1].
His thirsty and bloodless face, indicating that he now fed exclusively on Darcet gelatin soups [2], was a pale image of passion, simplified to the extreme. Deep wrinkles spoke of constant torment; He must have lost all his meager earnings on payday. Like those nags who are no longer affected by the blows of the whip, he would not flinch under any circumstances, he remained insensitive to the dull groans of the losers, to their silent curses, to their dull glances. It was the epitome of the game. If the young man had looked closely at this sad Cerberus, perhaps he would have thought: “There is nothing in his heart but a deck of cards! “But he did not listen to this personified advice, put here, of course, by Providence itself, just as it communicates something disgusting to the hallway of any brothel. He entered the hall with decisive steps, where the ringing of gold bewitched and blinded the soul, overwhelmed by greed. Probably, the young man was driven here by the most logical of all eloquent phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the sad meaning of which, I think, is this: “Yes, I admit that a person can go to play, but only when between himself and death he sees only his last ecu."
In the evenings, the poetry of the gambling houses is vulgar, but it is guaranteed success, just like the bloody drama. The halls are filled with spectators and players, poor old people who have trudged here to warm up, faces excited by the orgy that began with wine and is about to end in the Seine. Passion is on display here in abundance, but the over-the-top cast keeps you from looking the game's demon straight in the face. In the evenings it is a real concert, with the whole troupe screaming and each instrument of the orchestra delivering its own phrase. You will see here a lot of respectable people who came here for entertainment and pay for it in the same way as some pay for an interesting performance or for a delicacy, while others, having bought sellable caresses cheaply somewhere in the attic, then pay for them for three whole months with burning regrets. But will you understand to what extent a person is obsessed with excitement when he is impatiently waiting for the opening of a den? There is the same difference between an evening player and a morning player as between a careless husband and a lover languishing under the window of his beauty.
Only in the morning will you meet in the gambling house tremulous passion and need in all its terrible nakedness. That’s when you can admire a real player, a player who did not eat, did not sleep, did not live, did not think - so cruelly was he tormented by the scourge of failures, which carried away his constantly doubling bets, so he suffered, exhausted by the itch of impatience: when, will finally come up “trant e karant” [3]? At this damned hour, you will notice eyes whose calmness frightens you, you will notice faces that terrify you, glances that seem to lift the cards and devour them.
So, gambling houses are great only at the beginning of the game. In Spain there is a bullfight. There were gladiators in Rome, and Paris is proud of its Palais Royal, where the exciting roulette allows you to enjoy an exciting picture in which the blood flows in streams and does not threaten, however, to wet the feet of the spectators sitting on the stalls. Try to take a quick look at this arena, enter!.. What squalor! On the walls, covered with greasy wallpaper the size of a person, there is nothing that could refresh the soul. There is not even a nail that would make suicide easier. The parquet is shabby and dirty. The middle of the hall is occupied by an oval table. It is covered with cloth worn with gold coins, and there are chairs crowded around it - the simplest chairs with wicker straw seats, and this clearly exposes the strange indifference to luxury among people who come here to their destruction for the sake of wealth and luxury. Such contradictions are revealed in a person whenever passions fight with force in the soul.
The lover wants to dress his beloved in silk, clothe her in the soft fabrics of the East, and most often possesses her on a wretched bed. An ambitious man, dreaming of supreme power, grovels in the mud of servility. The merchant breathes the damp, unhealthy air in his shop in order to erect a vast mansion from where his son, heir to early wealth, will be expelled after losing a lawsuit against his brother. Yes, finally, is there anything less pleasant than a house of pleasure? Terrible thing! Eternally fighting with himself, losing hope in the face of impending troubles and saving himself from troubles with hopes for the future, a person in all his actions shows his characteristic inconsistency and weakness. Here on earth, nothing is fully realized except misfortune.
When the young man entered the hall, there were already several players there. Three bald old men were lounging around a green field; their faces, like plaster masks, impassive, like those of diplomats, revealed satiated souls, hearts that had long forgotten how to tremble even if the inviolable estate of their wife was at stake. A young black-haired Italian with an olive complexion calmly leaned his elbows on the edge of the table and seemed to listen to those secret premonitions that shout the fatal words to the player: “Yes! - No! “This southern face emanated gold and fire.
Seven or eight spectators stood in a row, as if in a gallery, and awaited the performance that was promised to them by the whim of fate, the faces of the actors, the movement of money and spatulas. These idle people were silent, motionless, attentive, like a crowd gathered on the Place de Greve when the executioner cuts off someone's head. A tall, thin gentleman in a shabby tailcoat held a notebook in one hand and a pin in the other, intending to mark how many times red and black would come up. He was one of the modern Tantalus, living aloof from the pleasures of his age, one of the misers gambling on an imaginary bet, something like a sensible madman who, in times of disaster, indulges himself with an impossible dream, who deals with vice and danger in the same way as young priests. - with communion, when they serve early mass. Opposite the player were the scoundrels who had studied all the chances of the game, looking like seasoned convicts who would not be frightened by the galleys, who had come here to risk three bets and, in case of a win, which was the only source of their income, to leave immediately. Two old footmen walked indifferently back and forth, crossing their arms, and from time to time looked out of the windows into the garden, as if in order to show their flat faces to passers-by instead of a sign. The cashier and the banker just threw a dull, murderous look at the punters and said in a choked voice: “Bet! “When the young man opened the door. The silence seemed to deepen even more; heads turned curiously to the new visitor. Unheard of! At the appearance of the stranger, the stupefied old men, the petrified lackeys, the spectators, even the Italian fanatic - absolutely everyone experienced some kind of terrible feeling. You have to be very unhappy to arouse pity, very weak to arouse sympathy, very gloomy in appearance, for hearts to tremble in this hall, where grief is always silent, where grief is cheerful and despair is decent. So it was precisely all these properties that gave rise to that new sensation that stirred the frozen souls when the young man entered. But didn’t the executioners sometimes shed tears on the blond girls’ heads, which they had to cut off at the signal given by the Revolution?
