All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction.  For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile.  There have been instances.

These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the pricks.  It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it.  And we all lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not.  Or they pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, “Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?” And the sage answered him, “Precisely for that reason—­because it does not avail.”  It is manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of distress; but the deep sense of Solon’s reply to the impertinent questioner is plainly seen.  And I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God.  And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us.  The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.  A miserere sung in common by a multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy.  It is not enough to cure the plague:  we must learn to weep for it.  Yes, we must learn to weep!  Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom.  Why?  Ask Solon.

There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious.  And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples.  And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.  Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness—­dyspepsia, for example; but at other times it is constitutional.  And it is useless to speak, as we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy.  Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature.  And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal.  Consciousness is a disease.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life.  I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Rene, Obermann, Thomson,[9] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—­men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge.