Poetry is rare, the vulgar, everywhere. This is essentially the crux of the spiritual crisis that does not let go of humans. By poetry, I mean the natural, not the intellectual, beauty of things. In other words, poetry that speaks directly to the heart, that tickles the eye and feeds the emotions.
Poetry is the other name of life. Whoever abuses it disorients the balance of beings and things. Whoever despises it erects a temple to ugliness and din. Anyone who does not know how to appreciate it misses out on the sublime. Like the bat, preferring darkness to the magic of the sun, he does not touch objects, he gropes them; it does not lap up the nectar, it swallows its illusion; he does not grasp the sap of bodies, he only divines their envelope.
The less poetry there is, the more unhappiness grows. Happiness nests in the secrets and details of life. Whoever wants to be in his arms smells things, explores their curves, textures, sounds, scents. Let him do it by imitating the bee and not the butterfly. The bee, noble and faithful insect, does not flutter about: it skilfully gathers pollen from the same pistils, produces the same pollen, the same honey. As for the butterfly, fickle, runner of flowers, renter of instantaneity, it does not set up work in spite of its beauty, it does not know how to roll the balls and to manufacture sugar.
Woe to him who possesses so many things and, possessed by the futility of his things, does not know how to get the slightest thrill out of them. Woe to him who has and who is not. Having without being, here you are shell of the egg without the yolk. The hull, of course, protects, but ends up waste. It is the yolk, nourished by the white, which turns into a chick.
But what am I building? A philosophy? A handbook of happiness? An almanac of certainties? What offense have I caught myself in? In the inextricable webs of thought, empty concepts far from practical life? Woe to me too who, stuck in the spiral of existence, have often opened my head and not my senses.
I am mined with paradoxes, like that absurd bather who, after soaking himself in the sea, flees, fearing the drops of rain on his already wet head. I am a soul of contradictions, oscillating between what I am, what I think I am, what I would like to become and what I will never be.
Living is not an easy job. It’s walking through a labyrinth, often groping. Running, sweating, falling into holes, climbing ridges. At each roundabout, there is a security guard waiting, a whistle giving orders, signaling that adjusts and disrupts, wires that cross and uncross and, all around, a bustling fauna, a swarm of sleepwalkers making turn the hive. And everywhere reign inconsistency, quantity and quantification. Most humans don’t really live: they either lack life or have too much of it.
The human being always retains, even on the threshold of old age, his whims of a badly brought up kid. Eternal dissatisfied, he grumbles all the time, sated or lacking. Everything he does not have and would like to have is necessarily good. What he has, though high in value, is low in price. When you live surrounded by mountains, you curse the majesty of the peaks, you fantasize about the plains. When you have swarthy skin, you are jealous of pink faces, and vice versa.
When you live in a society whose members take their time, you envy the countries where you run and you denounce the nonchalance of your own. When winter is here, we regret summer, and when it returns, we immediately bombard it with swear words, chasing it with blows: “Season of hell, leave us alone!” Long live the frost and the northern winds! »
Let those who want to be happy stop being everywhere. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. Neither with oneself, nor with others, nor with things. Above ground, suspended at the mercy of the winds. May he who wants to be happy inhabit the poetry of the world: dialogue with the lizard sneaking through the grass, smile at the nuthatch giving it a song, hug the tree in his garden, greedily inhale the aroma of coffee from the neighbour, sends the bone back to the perky dog with mud-smeared paws. May he who wants to be happy plant his toes in the humus of day and night, his senses feverish, his heart open to the graces of life.