Notes from a Room

Another ghastly night, with sleep broken up by nightmares. It was raining so hard I didn’t go to the church. I’ve never forced myself so much to pray, calmly at first, then with an almost desperate will (I hate the word desperate). But nothing came of it.

Oh, I know perfectly well that the desire to pray is already a prayer, and that God demands no more. But I wasn’t just fulfilling a duty. At that moment, prayer was as necessary to me as air to my lungs and oxygen to my blood. Behind me, there was no longer the familiar daily life from which you’ve broken free while keeping open the chance to return whenever you like. Behind me, there was nothing. And in front of me, a wall.

[…]

It’s one o’clock in the morning, and the last light in the village has gone out. Wind and rain.

The same solitude. The same silence. And this time, no hope of forcing my way through the obstacle, or going round it. Besides, there is no obstacle. I’m breathing, I inhale the night, the night enters me through some breach in the soul.

I force myself to think of fears similar to mine. No compassion for these strangers. My solitude is perfect, and I hate it. No self-pity.

[…]

It seems to me I’ve gone all the way back along the path I’ve been on since God took me from nothing. At first I was nothing but that spark, that glowing speck of divine love. And now again that’s all I am in this darkness: but the speck is about to be extinguished.

[…]

The sin against hope – the most fatal of all and perhaps the most warmly welcomed, the most caressed. It takes a lot of time to see it, and the sadness that foretells it, precedes it, is so sweet! It’s the richest of the demon’s elixirs, his ambrosia.

[…]

I’ve decided to keep writing this diary. Who knows? A sincere, scrupulously accurate account of the events of my life, and what I’m going through now, may be useful to me one day. Useful to me or to others. Because however hard my heart has become, I can’t think of the future – no doubt imaginary – reader of this diary without friendly feelings… Not that I really trust this tenderness, since it’s probably addressed, in these pages, only to myself.

[…]

No, I haven’t lost my faith. That expression ‘losing one’s faith’ – as one might lose one’s purse or keys – has always struck me as foolish. One doesn’t lose faith, it stops informing one’s life, that’s all. That’s why spiritual advisors in the old days weren’t wrong to be sceptical about such intellectual crises, which are no doubt much rarer than is claimed. I haven’t lost faith. The cruelty of my ordeal may have overturned my reason, my nerves, suddenly dried up the spirit of prayer in me – forever, who knows? – and filled me with a dark resignation, which is even scarier than the sudden plunges of despair, but my faith remains intact, I feel it. Wherever it is, though, I can’t reach it. I can’t find it in my poor brain, which is incapable of putting two thoughts together properly and is tormented by almost insane images, or in my conscience. It sometimes seems to me that it has receded and survives where I’d never have looked for it, in my wretched blood and flesh, in my perishable but baptized flesh.

— Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest (tr. Curtis, modified)

Of course, man is his own worst enemy: his own secret and insidious enemy. Wherever the seeds of evil are scattered, they are almost certain to grow. Whereas it takes amazingly good luck for the smallest grain of good not to be stifled.

— Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest