====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
====
Remy de Gourmont
From Mr. Antiphilos, Satyr
Translated by John Howard
The great gods no longer descending to an earth soiled by war, ownership, gold and those human laws which so badly translate the gentle divine laws, we remain the sole immortals that a herdsman can chance upon at the fall of day, as he walks along the path…They say the golden age will return. Let us hope so.
***
She faithfully returns, as she has promised, bringing on each trip a quantity of golden money with the most diverse effigies: I would never have supposed that the world contained so many tyrants. If they wage war, as was customary in the old days, in what state must the world be…?
***
Love is serious. When one has deep sensibility, love can cause tears; laughter, never. It is only among mortals that love is accompanied with laughter. The gods never laugh, except at the silliness of mankind.
***
Like nature, the gods exist only at the instant you speak and think of them, and as soon as your attention is distracted from divine things, they fall again into the dim, pantheistic immensity where their lives glide by, mute, deep and plant-like.
***
We are all,children of destiny and our immortal life is but a succession of mortal lives badly joined to each other by the confused mortar of recollection.
Source