[…] Have faith in Life [Ayez foi en la Vie]… May Life become, for you, not only some blind favourable fate, but a kind of Presence or animated benevolence, to which it will be possible, not only to trust, but to entrust yourself ! You know how much, through a complex of native dispositions, religious education and independent thinking, I have come to imbibe this conviction that the Universe (in us and around us) is, finally, a great birth within a gradual animation from which nothing escapes. The more I experience this path, the more I am convinced of its solidity, and of the fundamental (unassailable) joy to which it leads. Try it ! That is to say, learn to love, and to welcome without disturbance (like the influence of a loving power), the uncontrollable events that come to oppose your action ! And you will see that you will approach peace…

I think I told you, that all my ” religion I have to admit that my “active abandonment” to a World that I understand less and less in detail (in the sense that the traditional explanations that are given seem to me more and more insufficient) but whose ” divinization “or the ” personalization “I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer. That my existence has been, as much as possible, an act of fidelity to Life, is the only thing that interests me from now on, and that reassures me.

Now, what is an existence ” faithful to life ”   ? Is it a socially successful existence : with an apparent continuity, recognized success, a palpable result, a conquered stability ? Not necessarily at all ! (Personally, I no longer care about the apparent ” success ” of my passage here on earth). But I add this : Why do you want an existence, if it does not manage to become fixed or to fructify in a tangible work, to have less price than another ? Why shouldn’t the World, which needs stable families and well-established people, also need these mobile and wandering beings, whose action translates into a series of seemingly discontinuous touches or trials, across all sorts of domains ?… It is a great thing not to have a place to rest one’s head, if one has faith in the world in his heart. […]

Extracts from Fulfillment of Man. Unpublished letters (1926-1952), Grasset, 1968, p. 102-103
Selection  proposed independently by Guy Assens of Carcassonne and Arnaud de Bussac of Le Havre.  

 

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