Preface to the First Edition

The sick man, wasted by fever and consumed by thirst, dreams in his sleep of a cool stream where he bathes, or of a clear spring where he drinks in great gulps. So too, amid the complicated turmoil of modern existence, our exhausted souls dream of simplicity.

Is what we call by this beautiful name a good that has vanished forever? I do not think so. If simplicity were bound up with certain exceptional circumstances that only a few rare ages have known, we would have to give up any hope of realizing it again. Civilizations cannot be led back to their origins, any more than rivers with their troubled waters can be led back to the quiet little valley where the branches of the alders met above their source.

But simplicity does not depend on any particular economic or social conditions; it is rather a spirit that can animate and transform lives of very different kinds. Far from being reduced to pursuing it with powerless regrets, we can, I affirm, make it the object of our resolutions and the aim of our practical energy.

To aspire to the simple life is, properly speaking, to aspire to fulfill the highest human destiny. Every movement of humanity toward greater justice and greater light has also been a movement toward a simpler life. And the simplicity of the ancients, in art, in manners, and in ideas, keeps its incomparable value for us only because it succeeded in giving powerful relief to a few essential feelings and a few permanent truths. We must love this simplicity and strive to preserve it reverently. But whoever stopped at its outward forms and did not seek to realize its spirit would have gone only a hundredth part of the way. For if it is impossible for us to be simple in the same forms as our fathers, we can remain simple, or become simple again, in the same spirit. We walk other paths, but the goal of humanity remains at bottom the same: it is always the North Star that guides the sailor, whether he has shipped aboard a sailing vessel or a steamer.

To move toward this goal with the means at our disposal: that is the most important thing, today as in the past. And it is because we have so often strayed from it that we have tangled and complicated our lives.

If I could succeed in sharing this wholly inward notion of simplicity, my effort would not have been in vain. Some readers will think that such a notion ought to permeate our customs and our education. They will begin by cultivating it in themselves, and will sacrifice to it some of those habits that keep us from being fully human.

Too many useless encumbrances stand between us and the ideal of truth, justice, and goodness that should warm our hearts and bring them to life. All this undergrowth, on the pretext of sheltering us and our happiness, has ended by hiding the light from us. When shall we have the courage to answer the deceitful temptations of a life as complicated as it is barren with the reply of the sage: "Stand out of my sun"?

Paris, May 1895.

Translator's notes

"Stand out of my sun": the sage is Diogenes the Cynic, who, in the ancient anecdote, asked Alexander the Great, when the king offered him anything he wished, only to stand out of his sunlight.