Suddenly, right there in the train, I was given the answer! (Life is so often like that. An insignificant fact which might otherwise have completely escaped notice, is pounced upon by the mind that has been waiting for it.) Three ladies were standing in the corridor, chattering, their backs turned to me. An express train rushed past us. It made the windows bang like an explosion, and its whistle blast pierced my ears so brutally that I jumped. But in front of me, at the sudden “bang!” the ladies’ three backsides jumped too, like three big balls. All the rest of their bodies remained impassive and they continued their chatter without having noticed anything, without even being aware that their backsides had jumped half a foot high, as if their skirts had enclosed a jack-in-the-box or a frightened animal. The effect was extraordinarily comical but, above all, I suddenly realized that what had happened to Sylva, faced with her hare, was directly related, except that it was the exact opposite.
For what those independent bottoms showed when, at the sudden roar of the express train, they had tried to flee without even informing their owners’ brains, was how close to the crust of civilization there still survived the reflexes of the animal. Whereas Sylva’s sudden inhibition, which had abruptly checked the hunter’s instinct and suspended the reflex of the chase in full play, wasn’t this inhibition due to the birth of something rather remarkable: the absolutely novel surrender of those instincts to a still uncertain but evident form of reasoning will? What had been in those ladies’ bottoms a survival of ancient tropisms, was it not in my vixen, on the contrary, the beginning of their decline?
To be quite sure of it, we would naturally have to wait for a sufficient number of similar acts from Sylva. In the days that followed my return, I was happy to notice that there was indeed no lack of them. It was as if all along the line, her instincts, after the death of the dog, had effected a sort of general retreat. This was startling to watch, for, like all retreats, this one too proceeded in great disorder. Faced with the simplest stimulus, to which the fox-like reflexes would previously have responded instantly without the least hesitation, Sylva now seemed unsure and bewildered; sometimes she obeyed them in the end as she used to do, sometimes she seemed to reject them; in either case, the outcome for a long time remained unpredictable. And so it became increasingly clear that what was happening inside that mysterious skull ever since her little brain, shocked into activity by the tragic discovery of the human condition, had begun to function at a manifestly accelerated rhythm, was actually a kind of transfer of powers. Instinct, abandoning the premiership, was handing the government over to reason.
As the days passed, it became progressively evident that Sylva was ceasing to act on impulse by virtue of her automatisms, and beginning to act by choice in accordance with her preferences. And by the same stroke I realized for the first time that choice and automatism are mutually contradictory by definition. Any possibility of choice obviously excludes automatism (and farewell to instinct!) just as automatism necessarily excludes any possibility of choice (and farewell to reason!). A relentless dilemma! Was it conceivable that I had for so long been ignorant of such a self-evident truth? That’s the threshold, I told myself, the frontier that separates instinct from intelligence. Previously, like many animal-loving people, I had denied the existence of a definite borderline. What scatterbrains we are! The borderline is cut with a knife.
And so I discovered that, from the day of the hare onward, Sylva could never again obey all her impulses like a blind mechanism. Henceforth, I thought to myself, she would have to make up her mind herself. And in so doing she would lose one by one the automaton’s powers and precision, just as the human race has lost them. She would become hesitant, clumsy, she would take a hundred wrong turnings for one right one. With an almost anguished giddiness I realized in a flash of insight that this was a fatal, inevitable necessity; that it was part of the very essence of the human being. That to hope that one might acquire understanding and at the same time preserve one’s instinct was an absurd wish. That every conquest made by reason or by the will involves as a corollary the surrender of an innate but unconscious knowledge. And this relinquishment, I told myself, is the price we pay for our freedom.
As was indeed inevitable, Sylva’s indecision assumed greater proportions every day. Everything aroused in her an intense and absorbed attention. In many circumstances she behaved as she had when faced with the hare: a first instinctive movement, promptly checked as if to examine if that was really what she wanted to do. Of course she no longer knew what she really wanted, and more and more often she would mope in a kind of dreamy apathy. While this latter state aroused some anxiety in me, Nanny was delighted. At last, she said, she was on her home ground again, that of educating backward children. The sudden interest Sylva nowadays showed for all creatures and things around her, she also seemed to show, though still silently as a rule, for Nanny’s explanations. She would not say a word but some time later we would discover that she had grasped the gist. Nanny taught her to count on her fingers. Sylva watched her stretching them out one after the other, but she did not repeat the figures. Yet, while in the first days when we told her at lunch, “Go and fetch three apples,” she would bring us two or five at random, she eventually brought back the right number one day and never made a mistake again, whatever figure we mentioned.
I have said before that for a long time we were stumped by her inability to understand pictures, at least insofar as they represented animate beings, until she thought she recognized that of a motionless dog—the dead Baron. This revelation, as I have said, shook her violently (screams, gasps and sobs interspersed with the dog’s name) but simultaneously it seemed to have opened a door in this brain full of locks and bolts, onto a field with vast prospects; for on the next day all pictures had become intelligible for her and produced cries of pleasure.
Nanny gave her paper and pencil, showed her how to make use of them. To begin with, of course, her pupil only managed to scrawl at random, like a very small child. But the mere fact that she scribbled was already a remarkable novelty, and whenever some flourish happened to form a circle, she would exclaim, “An apple!” and laugh.
Indeed she now laughed more and more, thus confirming my own modest theories: it was death, I was certain of it, that had led her to laughter. It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace. An atavistic fear lies within us from our childhood, more or less unconscious and lurking in our depths, and when something delivers us from it for a fleeting second, it produces suddenly such a relief, lifts such a weight, that our body shakes with “brutal convulsions.” In laughter, in comedy, we seek a second’s respite, a short moment of organic oblivion from our condition. During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal.
Sylva always laughed after being afraid. She also laughed—not always—after some unforeseen effect of her acts. To have drawn an apple unintentionally was one of those effects. In order to experience this pleasure, she began to draw them on purpose. Then she learned from Nanny that one could put into a circle two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and she started to draw funny figures endlessly with childish fervor. But she would draw them lying down.
“Why lying down?” Nanny asked her eventually, intrigued. “Bonny, no more play,” said my vixen, and she laughed and jumped at me jocosely, kissing and biting me to manifest her joy at my being alive.