A metaphor:
“The Good Brahmin” by Voltaire
In my travels I once happened to meet with an aged Brahmin.
“I wish,” said the Brahmin to me one day, “I had never been born!”
“Why so?” said I.
“Because,” replied he, “I have been studying these
forty years, and I find it has been so much time lost. While I teach others I
know nothing myself. The sense of my condition is so humiliating, it makes all
things so distasteful to me, that life has become a burden. I have been born,
and I exist in time, without knowing what time is. I am placed, as our wise men
say, in the confines between two eternities, and yet I have no idea of
eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to satisfy
myself what it is that produces thought. I even am ignorant whether my
understanding is a simple faculty I possess, like that of walking and
digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a
thing with my hands. I am not only thus in the dark with relation to the
principles of thought, but the principles of my motions are entirely unknown to
me. I do not know why I exist, and yet I am applied to every day for a solution
of the enigma. I must return an answer, but can say nothing satisfactory on the
subject. I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking remain confounded
and ashamed of what I have said.”
The condition in which I saw this good man gave me
real concern. No one could be more rational, no one more open and honest. It
appeared to me that the force of his understanding and the sensibility of his
heart were the causes of his misery.
The same day I had a conversation with an old woman,
his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding
how her soul was made. She did not even comprehend my question. She had not,
for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with
which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed from the bottom
of her heart in the metamorphoses of her god Vishnu, and, provided she could
get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she
thought herself the happiest of women.
Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I
returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:
“Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not
fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives
contented?”
“You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a
thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old
neighbor, and yet it is a happiness I do not desire.”
This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on
me than any thing that had passed.
