ly upon
reality. Everything that the author permits us to see and understand
is seen through a single point of life--a hole pierced in the wall
between two rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is most
often twilight, with its romantic penumbra, darkening into the
obscurity of night by imperceptible degrees.

M. Barbusse has conceived the idea of making a man perceive the whole
spiritual tragedy of life through a cranny in the wall, and there is a
fine symbolism in this, as if he were vouchsafing us the opportunity to
perceive eternal things through the tiny crack which is all that is
revealed to us of infinity, so that the gates of Horn, darkened by our
human blindness, scarcely swing open before they close again.

The hero of this story has been dazzled by the flaming ramparts of the
world, so that eternity is only revealed to him in fiery glimpses that
shrivel him, and he is left in the dark void of time, clinging to a
dream which already begins to fail him.

And the significant thing about this book is that the final revelation
comes to him through the human voices of those who have suffered much,
because they have loved much, after his own daring intellectual flights
have failed him.

So this man who has confronted the greatest realities of life, enabled
to view them with the same objective detachment with which God sees
them, though without the divine knowledge which transmutes their
darkness, comes to learn that we carry all heaven and hell within
ourselves, and with a relentless insight, almost Lucretian in its
desperate intensity, he cries: "We are divinely alone, the heavens
have fallen on our heads." And he adds: "Here they will pass again,
day after day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will pass in
their kind of eternity. In the twilight when everything fades, they
will sit down near the light, in the room full of haloes; they will
drag themselves to the window's void. Their mouths will join and they
will grow tender. They will exchange a first or a last useless glance.
They will open their arms, they will caress each other. They will love
life and be afraid to disappear....

"I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come.
Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word which
does not lie, and which said over again, will satisfy."

Truly a great and pitiless book, but there is a cleansing wind running
through it, which sweeps away lif