Book
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo · 1862 · 1 reading card · public domain
1 card
- 01
The vastest thing to observe is not nature but a human conscience, with its struggles and its guilt.
Les Misérables · 1862
The soul is vaster than the sky, because there is no unit of measure there.
Hugo argues that the real drama unfolds not against the backdrop of history but in the inner forum, where a person judges his own acts. That is why his novel sets the sea and the sky, things we can measure, against the soul, where no unit of measure exists. His mechanism is concrete: a former convict who has paid his debt to the law discovers that the debt to conscience never expires. A single act, whether a miser forgives or not, can burn him down from the start. The novel thus shows that society punishes deeds, but the soul punishes itself, more thoroughly and more justly than any court.
“There is a spectacle greater than the sea: it is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky: it is the interior of the soul.”