I may be preoccupied with my health, my fortune, or even with my inward perfection . Pessimism is rooted in the same soil as the inability to be at the disposal of others. It denies itself quite simply when it falls to the level of infra-dialectical materialism. It transcends itself, or it tends to transcend itself, when it opens itself out to the experience of the suprahuman, an experience which can hardly be ours in a genuine and lasting way this side of death, but of which the possibility is warranted by any philosophy which refuses to be immured in the postulate of absolute immanence or subscribe in advance to the denial of the beyond and of the unique and veritable transcendence. In the last analysis testimony bears on an event or that part of an event which is unique and irrevocable.
Testimony is based on fidelity to a light or, to use another language, to a grace received.
The world seemed to me then, as now, an indeterminate place in which to extend as much as possible the region where one is at home and to decrease that which is vaguely imagined or known only by hearsay, in an abstract and lifeless manner. I think that my love of travel has always been bound up with the need to make the world inward to me by becoming, as it were, a naturalised citizen of the greater part of it. For my part, I cannot think without nostalgia of the dusk of that Europe in which the material conditions of life seemed to be so easy, and where communication between countries was almost untrammeled. All the evidence goes to suggest that we come up against obstacles which are inherent in our condition as men, and that we cannot overcome these obstacles without an interior transformation which we cannot operate by ourselves.