Resignation and detachment

Use in the book

Guérin’s emphatic Fiat follows his recognition that perfect earthly happiness is impossible. Yet later resignation looks less like settled consent than emergency shelter. The pursued animal enters its burrow to survive, and the speaker imagines remaining there permanently. Safety is real, but so is the loss of open life. The elaborate natural comforts within the refuge cannot wholly erase that cost.

The following day gives acceptance another form. Consent to an undisclosed providential use makes an apparently fruitless life capable of cooperation with good. Here the unknown is trusted rather than merely endured. A subsequent attempt at abnegation is more bitter: he ridicules ambition and bites himself with inward sarcasm. The same vocabulary of relinquishment can therefore accompany spiritual trust or self-punishment.

Late reflections seek patience, calm, and a less ostentatious life modeled partly on Marie’s reserve. The wish for rest persists, but rest is not equivalent to the numbing absence of feeling elsewhere called worse than nervous sensitivity. Guérin repeatedly tries to distinguish a peace that conserves inward life from a retreat that extinguishes its claims.

Places to read

1. 22 April 1833 · ¶2Fiat follows acknowledgment that an unblemished earthly happiness is unavailable.
2. 25 May 1834 · ¶1Resignation becomes a protective burrow whose safety also confines the speaker.
3. 26 May 1834 · ¶1Acquiescence is productive consent to an unknown good rather than mere inactivity.
4. 10 June 1834 · ¶1Self-denial becomes punitive sarcasm, revealing its distance from achieved peace.
5. 27 March 1835 · ¶3Patience is proposed as wisdom for a being whose duration is brief.

Translation in this edition

The English retains Fiat! fiat!, with translator’s note 10 explaining “Let it be done!” It uses “acquiescence” for acquiescement at 26 May 1834 · ¶1, preserving a nuance of consent distinct from the repeated “resignation” of the burrow meditation.