August 9, 1859.—Nature is forgetful:
the world is almost more so. However little the individual may lend
himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. This rapid and
inexorable expansion of the universal life,
which covers, overflows,
and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and
annuls all
memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be
born, to struggle, to disappear—there is the whole
ephemeral drama
of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one,
our memory passes like a
ripple on the water, or a breeze in the
air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life. Like a
dream
which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my
past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall
away from my
consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel
myself then stripped and empty,
like a convalescent who remembers
nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes,
have
faded from my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties
drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off,
like the
chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a more
elementary form. I behold my own
unclothing; I forget, still more
than I am forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living,
and I feel, as
it were, the indescribable peace of annihilation, and
the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the river
of time
passing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows of life gliding
past me, but nothing breaks the
cateleptic tranquillity which
enwraps me
.
Amiel's Journal
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