Sylva

She answered, “Yes.” Then, in a lower tone, she corrected herself: “No.” She shrugged her shoulders and repeated, “Dunno.” And she stared at me, her forehead puckered with a worried line, as if I could perhaps explain to her the strange indecision that had overcome her. Naturally, on the spur of the moment, I was quite incapable of it and we had walked on without saying anything.

Suddenly, right there in the train, I was given the answer! (Life is so often like that. An insignificant fact which might otherwise have completely escaped notice, is pounced upon by the mind that has been waiting for it.) Three ladies were standing in the corridor, chattering, their backs turned to me. An express train rushed past us. It made the windows bang like an explosion, and its whistle blast pierced my ears so brutally that I jumped. But in front of me, at the sudden “bang!” the ladies’ three backsides jumped too, like three big balls. All the rest of their bodies remained impassive and they continued their chatter without having noticed anything, without even being aware that their backsides had jumped half a foot high, as if their skirts had enclosed a jack-in-the-box or a frightened animal. The effect was extraordinarily comical but, above all, I suddenly realized that what had happened to Sylva, faced with her hare, was directly related, except that it was the exact opposite.

For what those independent bottoms showed when, at the sudden roar of the express train, they had tried to flee without even informing their owners’ brains, was how close to the crust of civilization there still survived the reflexes of the animal. Whereas Sylva’s sudden inhibition, which had abruptly checked the hunter’s instinct and suspended the reflex of the chase in full play, wasn’t this inhibition due to the birth of something rather remarkable: the absolutely novel surrender of those instincts to a still uncertain but evident form of reasoning will? What had been in those ladies’ bottoms a survival of ancient tropisms, was it not in my vixen, on the contrary, the beginning of their decline?

To be quite sure of it, we would naturally have to wait for a sufficient number of similar acts from Sylva. In the days that followed my return, I was happy to notice that there was indeed no lack of them. It was as if all along the line, her instincts, after the death of the dog, had effected a sort of general retreat. This was startling to watch, for, like all retreats, this one too proceeded in great disorder. Faced with the simplest stimulus, to which the fox-like reflexes would previously have responded instantly without the least hesitation, Sylva now seemed unsure and bewildered; sometimes she obeyed them in the end as she used to do, sometimes she seemed to reject them; in either case, the outcome for a long time remained unpredictable. And so it became increasingly clear that what was happening inside that mysterious skull ever since her little brain, shocked into activity by the tragic discovery of the human condition, had begun to function at a manifestly accelerated rhythm, was actually a kind of transfer of powers. Instinct, abandoning the premiership, was handing the government over to reason.

As the days passed, it became progressively evident that Sylva was ceasing to act on impulse by virtue of her automatisms, and beginning to act by choice in accordance with her preferences. And by the same stroke I realized for the first time that choice and automatism are mutually contradictory by definition. Any possibility of choice obviously excludes automatism (and farewell to instinct!) just as automatism necessarily excludes any possibility of choice (and farewell to reason!). A relentless dilemma! Was it conceivable that I had for so long been ignorant of such a self-evident truth? That’s the threshold, I told myself, the frontier that separates instinct from intelligence. Previously, like many animal-loving people, I had denied the existence of a definite borderline. What scatterbrains we are! The borderline is cut with a knife.

And so I discovered that, from the day of the hare onward, Sylva could never again obey all her impulses like a blind mechanism. Henceforth, I thought to myself, she would have to make up her mind herself. And in so doing she would lose one by one the automaton’s powers and precision, just as the human race has lost them. She would become hesitant, clumsy, she would take a hundred wrong turnings for one right one. With an almost anguished giddiness I realized in a flash of insight that this was a fatal, inevitable necessity; that it was part of the very essence of the human being. That to hope that one might acquire understanding and at the same time preserve one’s instinct was an absurd wish. That every conquest made by reason or by the will involves as a corollary the surrender of an innate but unconscious knowledge. And this relinquishment, I told myself, is the price we pay for our freedom.