Invincible Summer

I first came to Albert Camus's "Return to Tipasa" because it is the source of the quotation "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." (I hadn't realised that this is also circulated in a longer form with added explanations that were never written by Camus, though that did not surprise me as I've written elsewhere about the quotations that have come to be attributed to Yeats.)

What struck me was the way that there were so many echoes in the writing of the great absurdist and existentialist, Camus, of the great supernaturalist, Yeats. Yet, however close Yeats finds the supernatural world to the material, he constantly reaffirms the importance of physical reality, and even if there may be many other lives than the one we are living now, there is no indication that he thinks that humans should strive to be aware of anything beyond this life, which should be seized and savoured.

Two pieces by Yeats seem particularly close, "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" and the final section of the "Dedication to Vestigia" of A Vision (1925), with further echoes of "Stream and Sun at Glendalough" and "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" or "The Stare's Nest by My Window". Among the resemblances are the memories of the ignominies of growing up ("A Dialogue"), the Mediterranean and Classical landscape ("Vestigia"), the sense of a supreme moment ("Stream and Sun"), and the consciousness of human hatred ("Remorse").

 

View of Capri from a Sorrento vineyard

I don't wish to exaggerate the similarities, but I am more and more aware that sometimes the end products of Yeats's mysticism can come very close to the end products of avowedly atheist writers. Although Yeats views human beings as inhabiting a world with many other unseen spirits in other dimensions, his metaphysical system does not give much much attention to the meaning or purpose of life. The process of learning and rebirth dominates for him, not the end, and one could even see the repeated rounds of incarnations on the Great Wheel as a form of the Myth of Sisyphus, were it not for the fact that Yeats affirms a gradual change and evolution to something more perfect at the end of that process.

 

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

 

from "A Dialogue of Self and Soul"

 

Capri, with the Roman Villa Jovis on the high ground.

Doubtless I must someday complete what I have begun, but for the moment my imagination dwells upon a copy of Powys Mather’s Arabian Nights that awaits my return home. I would forget the wisdom of the East and remember its grossness and its romance. Yet when I wander upon the cliffs where Augustus and Tiberius wan­dered, I know that the new intensity that seems to have come into all visible and tangible things is not a reaction from that wisdom but its very self. Yesterday when I saw the dry and leafless vineyards at the very edge of the motionless sea, or lifting their brown stems from almost inaccessible patches of earth high up on the cliff-side, or met at the turn of the path the orange and lemon trees in full fruit, or the crimson cactus flower, or felt the warm sunlight falling between blue and blue, I murmured, as I have countless times, ‘I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and return­ing life after life like an insect in the roots of the grass.’ But mur­mured it without terror, in exultation almost.

A Vision (1925), Dedication ("To Vestigia"), xiii 

 

Roman ruins at Tipasa, Algeria

There is not a single one of these sixty-nine kilometers of highway that is not filled for me with memories and sensations. A violent childhood, adolescent daydreams to the hum of the bus’s engines, mornings, the freshness of young girls, beaches, young muscles always tensed, the slight anguish that the evening brings to a sixteen-year-old heart, the desire to live, glory, and always the same sky, for months on end, with its inexhaustible strength and light, as companion to the years, a sky insatiable, one by one devouring victims lying crucified upon the beach at the funereal hour of noon. Always the same sea as well, almost impalpable in the morning air, glimpsed again on the horizon as soon as the road, leaving the Sahel and its hills with their bronze-colored vineyards, dipped down toward the coast. But I did not stop to look at it. I wanted to see the Chenoua again—that heavy, solid mountain, carved all in one piece and running along the west side of Tipasa Bay before descending into the sea. You see it from far away, long before you get there, as a light blue haze still mingling with the sea. But gradually it condenses as you come nearer, until it takes on the color of the waters surrounding it, like an immense and motionless wave brutally caught in the very act of breaking over a suddenly calm sea. Nearer still, almost at the gates of Tipasa, you see its frowning mass, brown and green, the old, unshakable, moss-covered god, port and haven for its sons, of whom I am one. I was gazing at it as I finally crossed the barbed wire and stood among the ruins. And, in the glorious December light, as happens only once or twice in lives that may later be described as heaped with every blessing, I found exactly what I had come in search of, something which in spite of time and in spite of the world was offered to me and truly to me alone, in this deserted nature. From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. And, now awake, I recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds that made up the silence: the basso continuo of the birds, the short, light sighing of the sea at the foot of the rocks, the vibration of the trees, the blind song of the columns, the whispering of the absinthe plants, the furtive lizards. I heard all this, and also felt the waves of happiness rising up within me. I felt that I had at last come back to harbor, for a moment at least, and that from now on this moment would never end. But soon afterward the sun rose visibly a degree higher in the sky. A blackbird chirped its brief prelude and immediately, from all around, bird voices exploded with a strength, a jubilation, a joyful discord, an infinite delight. The day moved on. It was to carry me through till evening. At noon, on the half-sandy slopes, strewn with heliotropes like a foam that the furious waves of the last few days had left behind in their retreat, I gazed at the sea, gently rising and falling as if exhausted, and quenched two thirsts that cannot be long neglected if all one’s being is not to dry up, the thirst to love and the thirst to admire. For there is only misfortune in not being loved; there is misery in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misery. This is because blood and hatred lay bare the heart itself; the long demand for justice exhausts even the love that gave it birth. In the clamor we live in, love is impossible and justice not enough. That is why Europe hates the daylight and can do nothing but confront one injustice with another. In order to prevent justice from shriveling up, from becoming nothing but a magnificent orange with a dry, bitter pulp, I discovered one must keep a freshness and a source of joy intact within, loving the daylight that injustice leaves unscathed, and returning to the fray with this light as a trophy. Here, once more, I found an ancient beauty, a young sky, and measured my good fortune as I realized at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky had never left me. It was this that in the end had saved me from despair. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our drydocks or our debris. In Tipasa, the world is born again each day in a light always new. Oh light! The cry of all the characters in classical tragedy who come face to face with their destinies. I knew now that their final refuge was also ours. In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

"Return to Tipasa" (1953) ("Retour à Tipasa", L'Été (Gallimard, 1954)

 

Mount Chenoua and the Bay of Tipasa
(J.P. Dalbéra/commons.wikimedia.org)

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.

from "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" 

 

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

from "The Stare's Nest at My Window"
("Meditations in Time of Civil War")