The same silence as before seemed to swallow up this last cry. Clerambault lived outside of popular circles where he would have found the warm sympathy of simple, healthy minds. Not the slightest echo of his thought came to him.
He knew that he was not really alone, though he seemed so. Two apparently contradictory sentiments—his modesty and his faith—united to say to him: “What you thought, others have thought also; you are too small, this truth is too great, to exist only in you. The light that your weak eyes have seen has shone also for others. See where now the Great Bear inclines to the horizon—millions of eyes are looking at it, perhaps; but you cannot see them, only the far-off light makes a bond between their sight and yours.”
The solitude of the mind is only a painful delusion; it has no real existence, for even the most independent of us are members of a spiritual family. This community of spirit has no relation to time or space; its elements are dispersed among all peoples and all ages. Conservatives see them in the past, but the revolutionists and the persecuted look to the future for them. Past and future are not less real than the immediate present, which is a wall beyond which the calm eyes of the flock can see nothing. The present itself is not what the arbitrary divisions of states, nations, and religions would have us believe. In our time humanity is a bazaar of ideas, unsorted and thrown together in a heap, with hastily constructed partitions between them, so that brothers are separated from brothers, and thrown in with strangers. Every country has swallowed up different races, not formed to think and act together; so that each one of these spiritual families, or families-in-law, which we call nations, comprises elements which in fact form part of different groups, past, present, or future. Since these cannot be destroyed, they are oppressed; they can escape destruction only by some subterfuge, apparent submission, inward rebellion, or flight and voluntary exile. They are Heimatlos. To reproach them for lack of patriotism is to blame Irishmen and Poles for their resistance to English and Prussian absorption. No matter where they are, men remain loyal to their true country. You who pretend that the object of this war is to give the right of self-determination to all peoples, when will you restore this right to the great Republic of free souls dispersed over the whole world?
However cut off from the world, Clerambault knew that this Republic existed. Like the Rome of Sertorius, it dwelt in him, and though they may be unknown each to the other, it dwells in every man to whom it is the true Country.