“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun itself is but a morning star.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
You see, Félix, in these wild regions one must plunge far back into time and rise very early indeed, long before the first trees raised their green vault above the continents, long before the great reptiles wandered across the still-young earth. In that age, measured not in centuries but in millions of years, the archipelago was nothing more than a sigh beneath the crust of the world, a forgotten tremor deep within the thickness of the earth’s mantle. It is much the same with myself. In the many folds of this mantle, far too large, which has somehow become my own, I tremble almost without ceasing... and this constant trembling leads my thoughts, again and again, toward the days yet to come.
To think truly can undo our ordinary securities. It can unsettle us, strip away certainties, make the identity we believed immutable begin to waver. Thinking is not always comfortable... you know that well. Thought touches birth, loss, and death.
And yet there is a promise within this text. It also says: “One can be reborn. One can begin one’s life anew.” This means that the descent toward the origin is not merely destructive. It can also open the way to a new beginning. By passing through something very ancient, very obscure, we may recover a form of life that is more vivid, less imprisoned within the automatisms of the group.
When he writes, “The first world can thrust its muzzle into the second world,” the image is almost animal. The first world is the archaic world, the primitive world, prior to words, prior to social rules. The second world is the organized, civilized, spoken, regulated world. The first has not disappeared. It still pushes its head into the second. It continues to pass through it. The most ancient past is not dead. It rises and rises again.
This is what he expresses even more simply a little later: “The long-ago still surges forth.” The long-ago is the former time, the very ancient. But for him, as for the Moon Child, it is not a past locked behind us. It is a past that insists upon returning and that emerges within the present. What is oldest within us is often also what appears most spontaneously: a sudden fear, a desire, an image, an emotion without explanation, an attraction toward the night, toward the forest, toward the sea, toward a face, toward a piece of music. The most ancient has not been abolished. It is still at work.
Here we arrive at the final sentence concerning nature: “Nature is the best of visibles.” This means that, among all the things we see, nature is perhaps what still most clearly allows that older origin to appear. Why? Because it is not entirely made by human hands. It emerges. It grows. It springs forth. It overflows. It comes from a depth older than our constructions. When he adds that its “surging still springs from behind the first visibility,” he means that in nature something of the origin remains visible. Not completely, not clearly, but perceptibly. A light upon the sea, a branch moving in the wind, a beast appearing from nowhere, the brilliance of the sun — all these can give us the impression of seeing something that comes from much farther away than anything we are capable of naming.
The final expression, “a strange retrospective glance,” is magnificent. It means that to see nature is not merely to look ahead. It is also, in a sense, to look backward, toward a past for which we possess no precise memory, toward a depth that precedes our conscious life. Nature allows us to feel something archaic. It reminds us of a first world that we never truly knew as subjects, yet from which we come.
To simplify greatly, one could say that this text tells us the following: human beings often believe that they think alone, yet they never think alone.
They think — we think — within a language we have received, within stories we did not choose, within a dependence older than ourselves. Yet we may attempt to climb back toward that obscure origin. It disturbs us, it places us in danger, but it may also allow us to be reborn. And nature remains one of the rare places where that origin still allows itself to be glimpsed.
It was there that a strange feeling came upon me... an implacable emergence... I found myself identifying with the Moon Child. I do not know how. And from that moment onward, despite my awareness of the fault, I have been unable to drive the thought away. And you know how cruel the hunt is for the hunter who is himself being hunted...
The Moon Child appeared to me — it is difficult to tell you this — not as a source of even the smallest fragment of freedom, but with a profound and sometimes painful lucidity... like an origin itself.
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