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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

V. THE UNKNOWN GUEST

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It has many other no less strange and perhaps more important manifestations, which we propose to examine in a later volume, notably its surprising therapeutic virtues and its phenomena of materialization. But, without expressing a premature judgment on what we do not yet know, perhaps we have sketched it with sufficient clearness in the foregoing pages to enable us henceforward to disentangle certain general and characteristic features from a confusion of often contradictory lines.

But, in the first place, does it really exist, this tragic and comical, evasive and unavoidable figure which we make no claim to portray, but at most to divest of some of its shadows? It were rash to affirm it too loudly; but meanwhile, in the realms where we suppose it to reign, everything happens as though it did exist. Do away with it and you are obliged to people the world and burden your life with a host of hypothetical and imaginary beings: gods, demigods, angels, demons, saints, spirits, shells, elementals, etherial entities, interplanetary intelligences and so on; except it and all those phantoms, without disappearing, for they may very well continue to live in its shadow, become superfluous or accessory. It is not intolerant and does not definitely eliminate any of the hypotheses by the aid of which man has hitherto striven to explain what he did not understand, hypotheses which, in regard to some matters, are not inadmissible, although not one of them is confirmed; but it brings him back to itself, absorbs them and rules them without annihilating them. If, for instance, to select the most defensible theory, one which it is sometimes difficult to dismiss absolutely, if you insist that the discarnate spirits take part in your actions, haunt your house, inspire your thoughts, reveal your future, it will answer:

"That is true, but it is still I; I am discarnate, or rather I am not wholly incarnate: it is only a small part of my being that is embodied in your flesh; and the rest, which is nearly all of me, comes and goes freely both among those who once were and among those who are yet to be; and, when they seem to speak to you, it is my own speech that borrows their customs and their voice in order to make you listen and to amuse your often slumbering attention. If you prefer to deal with superior entities of unknown origin, with interplanetary or supernatural intelligences, once more it is I; for, since I am not entirely in your body, I must needs be elsewhere; and to be elsewhere when one is not held back by the weight of the flesh is to be everywhere if one so pleases."

We see, it has a reply to everything, it takes every name that we wish and there is nothing to limit it, because it lives in a world wherein bounds are as illusory as the useless words which we employ on earth.

While it has a reply to everything, certain manifestations which it deliberately ascribes to the spirits have brought upon it a not undeserved reproach. To begin with, as Dr. Maxwell observes, it has no absolutely fixed doctrine. In nearly every country in the world, when it speaks in the name of the spirits, it declares that they undergo reincarnation and readily relates their past existences. In England, on the contrary, it usually asserts that they do not become reincarnated. What does this mean? Surely this ignorance or this inconsistency on the part of that which appears to know everything is very strange! And worse, sometimes it attributes to the spirits, sometimes to itself or any one or anything the revelations which it makes to us. When exactly is it speaking the truth? At least on two occasions out of three, it deludes itself or deludes us. If it deceive itself, if it is mistaken about a matter in which it should be easy for it to know the truth, what can it teach us on the subject of a world of whose most elementary laws it is ignorant, since it does not even know whether it is itself or another that speaks to us in the name of that world? Are we to believe that it was in the same darkness as our poor superficial ego, which it pretends so often to enlighten and which it does in fact inspire in most of the great events of life? If it deceives us, why does it do so? We can see no object: it asks for nothing, not for alms, nor prayers, nor thoughts, on behalf of those whose mantle it assumes for the sole purpose of leading us astray. What is the use of those mischievous and puerile pranks, of those ghastly graveyard pleasantries? It must lie then for the mere pleasure of lying; and our unknown guest, that infinite and doubtless immortal subconsciousness in which we have placed out last hopes, is after all but an imbecile, a buffoon or a rank swindler!