Sylva

I remained dumfounded, a little ashamed. It would be an understatement to say that I was startled by the shrewdness of this remark: it was a positive eye-opener. I am not one of those people who get bogged down in metaphysics; I have always accepted things as they are, with a matter-of-fact turn of mind that suits a man who lives close to the soil. And I told myself that this quaint thought which had come to my little human vixen, despite its air of obviousness, had never occurred to me. And I wondered whether there were many people who had put it so clearly-if there were even many scientists who would notice how primitive and cardinal it is at one and the same time: “Why doesn’t one know?” indeed? And why “are we prevented”? By Jove, wasn’t Sylva’s surprise, her anger, the keystone of everything-of all that makes up the nobility of the mind of man? But men have wandered astray amid the trees of innumerable questions and lost sight of the forest of interrogation that encompasses them all: why, for what end, has our brain been created so accomplished that it is able to grasp everything, and yet so weak that it knows nothing-neither what it is itself, nor the body which it controls, nor this universe from which they both emanate? And because my vixen had a perfectly new brain, one which had not had the time to become cluttered up with trees, she had knocked directly against the forest of this “why” which we hardly ever think of, though it is the most stupendous, the most inexplicable inconsistency of the human condition…

… And one which, if men had the least common sense, ought to guide all their deeds and all their thoughts. And which, from that day onward, did indeed guide Sylva’s efforts. She brought a constant, burning ardor to her endeavors to understand the meaning of the things that surrounded her. Nanny taught her to read in the Scriptures. Sylva plunged into them with passionate eagerness and curiosity. She made me think of a gaping gourd, parched with questions no less urgent for being often inarticulate, which suddenly receives a great stream of thirst-slaking water. It even made me squirm a little. I am a reasonably good Christian, but all the same I had an uneasy feeling that this smacked a little of sharp practice, of trickery. I could not help telling myself that starved for enlightenment as she was, she would have devoured with the same greed whatever food one offered her. I could see for myself, in its most primitive state, the violence of this fundamental craving and the consequent power of the priests who assuage it. I thought to myself that these priests, from time immemorial and in all persuasions, have actually had it all their own way. I felt shaken in my own beliefs, although it is true that they had never been very vigorous.

I myself gave her natural history books to read and watched her-with some satisfaction, I confess-if not prefer these books to the Gospels proposed by Mrs. Bumley (all I held against her, in fact, was that she was a rather too rabid Papist), at least gradually devote more time to them. I also noticed that she too was subject to the phenomenon I have already mentioned, whereby she indirectly revealed to me how it operated with most people: progressively as her mind enriched itself, which means as it began to cope in detail with her ignorance, her fantastically diverse ignorance, she grew more remote from it in bulk, she lost sight of the outrage which had revolted her in the first place-men’s ignorance as such. And not only did she lose sight of it but, little by little, when I talked about it, it seemed to irritate her. As if for her too the trees were beginning to hide the wood, making her lose interest in it.

As fresh acquisitions made her discover ever new gaps in her knowledge, her curiosity was fired with zeal to fill them, but as these gaps concerned ever smaller details, her curiosity too operated within ever narrower limits. By a natural progression she became almost completely detached from the great ontological problem and devoted herself to ever more realistic and practical matters. For by discovering the tangible world abounding in acquired knowledge, defined objects, specified feelings, interpreted sensations, explained relationships, she lost her unease, her disquiet and, with disquiet, the feeling of that total ignorance which had so frightened her at first. In short, her mind passed, in next to no time, from the anguished fears of the Stone Age to the calm certainties of our modern British civilization.