THE STRICKEN YEARS
morose and, except for old and tried friends, I receive nobody
with true pleasure. The spectacle of our epoch saddens me; I lose
confidence in my nation; I feel myself growing older, and I see
my health giving way and my strength declining.’ A few weeks
later he complained to Buzon, in a near-agony of frustration: ‘This
middle way which is neither rest nor work annoys me more than
anything else. Either death, or work and production, I cry end
lessly to myself. And neither strength, death nor the devil comes.’
He had the feeling that shadows were moving in his head, and at
times seemed to feel a friendly and very gentle hand resting on
his shoulder and a voice saying to him: ‘Enough!’
It was perhaps the feeling that he was approaching the final
reckoning with time and death that filled Proudhon’s letters
during this unhappy year of 1863 with passages of reflection that
often show a revealing insight into some o f the more puzzling
aspects o f his own thought and character. He returned, for in
stance, to the question o f contradiction of ideas, and told one
friend: ‘The truth is one, but it appears to us in fragments and
from very different angles. Our duty is to express it as we see it,
no matter whether we contradict ourselves in reality or in appear
ance.’ And to another friend he defined the character o f his think
ing very clearly in the following sentence: ‘The nature o f my
mind could be characterised in one phrase; mobility itself, but
always returning to equilibrium.’
The idea o f mobility is linked with Proudhon’s conception of
life as a conflict, never terminated but sometimes stabilised by an
equilibrium between opposing forces, and in this symbolic war
it was not surprising that he should see himself as a perpetual
warrior.
‘The life o f man, in all professions, is ever the same,’ he told
Maurice. ‘It is a real war; one must exterminate the adversary or
resign oneself to being devoured... Since it is impossible to
escape from it, I do it well, and the more I advance in age and
experience, the more decided I am.’
Often Proudhon’s feeling o f being in the midst of perpetual
conflict led him to behave with preposterous arrogance. But
beneath this pasteboard armour o f bombast was concealed an
essential modesty, which emerged in his more intimate friend
ships and which was displayed in a letter he wrote to Buzon after
his Bordelais friend had praised him more than he felt he deserved.
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