On the Australians’ Opinions of This Life

There are three things I should mention regarding the Australians’ opinions about life. The first has to do with its conception, the second with its preservation, and the third with its end.

I have already spoken of how their children come into this world. But as this is one of the main subjects of this story, one which would never cease to amaze were its truth made known (according to my depiction of it), I believe it appropriate to speak more on this. The Australians are so averse to hearing about the beginning of life that, a year or so after my arrival, when I broached the topic in conversation with two brothers, they withdrew from me with as much horror as they would had I committed a crime. One day, after having received much censure on this subject, I brought it up with my old philosopher, who tried at length to prove to me that children grow in their entrails in the same way that fruits grow on trees. But when he saw that all his reasoning had made no impression on me and that I could not help but smile, he left without finishing, attesting that my incredulity was due to the corruption of my mind.

For the first six months after my arrival, the brothers’ extraordinary caresses caused me to experience an uncontrollable movement, which some of them noticed, and they were so scandalized by it that they abandoned me. This is what earned me the hatred of them all, as I have mentioned, and my death would have been certain were it not for the old man’s special assistance. I must say that in the thirty-two years that I lived among them, I was not able to find out when or how they procreate. Their parts are extremely small and give no sign of those natural discharges common to women who are not pregnant. Their children do not suffer from ringworm, measles, smallpox, and other misfortunes to which European children are subject.

As soon as an Australian has conceived, he leaves his apartment and goes to the heb, where he is received with special congratulations and fed without having to work. They have a certain elevated spot in which to deliver their fruit, where they spread their legs and let the infant fall out onto a bed of balf leaves, after which the mother picks it up, rubs it with the leaves, and nurses it without having lost any blood or appearing to suffer in the slightest. They use no swaddling clothes or diapers or cradles. The mother’s milk is so nourishing that it sates them for two years, and their excrement is so minimal it is as if they do not produce any at all.

They ordinarily speak within eight months, walk within a year, and are weaned within two years. At three years they begin to reason with the help of some amusements I am not able to explain. As soon as the mother leaves them, the first master of the first band teaches them the basic elements, and they remain under his guidance for three years. They then move on to the tutelage of the second master, who teaches them writing, for the next four years. This continues until they reach age thirty-five, at which point they have all mastered all the natural sciences, without any distinguishable difference in ability between them. Having thus completed their education, they are prepared to be lieutenants, that is, to take the place of those who wish to leave this world.

In Chapter 5 I spoke of their demeanor, which, in truth, displays a gentleness mixed with seriousness that is uncommon in Europe. Their health is so inviolable that they never know illness. I believe the soundness of their constitution is due to their conception and to the excellent food they eat without excess. Our ills have the opposite causes: namely, we are conceived in passion and we consume unhealthy food without measure. Our parents ordinarily pass on to us whatever defects they have contracted in their disordered lives. If they are gluttonous, they transfer their excesses to us and we must purge them to survive. If they are too passionate, they cause us to be born with boiling blood and countless impurities on our bodies. In a word, they make us as they are, for they can only give us what they have. Their ardor makes us lusty dogs; their bile inflames us with rage.

The Australians are exempt from all these passions because their parents do not have them, and thus they cannot be passed down. As they have no principle of emotional excitement, they live in a sort of indifference, moved only by what reason impresses upon them. The same could be said about their attitude toward food. For although the rotten meats often eaten by Europeans make them quite miserable, it is common for them to eat two or three times the amount necessary for their sustenance, resulting in fevers, catarrhs, upset stomachs, and other similar infirmities which are unknown to the Australians. The latter’s hearty fruits and admirable moderation in eating only what they need protect them from all our illnesses. Far from reveling in eating and sumptuous feasting, they hide themselves and eat in secret, as if on the sly. They have no set meal times, for they consider eating to be an animalistic function from which a man ought to abstain if he can. As a result, they have so little need of the provisions we would call ordinary that they scarcely produce any excrement in a week.

They all agree this life is nothing but a source of agitation, trouble, and torment. They are convinced that what we call death is their great rest, and that the greatest possible good for any creature is to return there as early as possible. This belief causes them to live not only in a state of indifference to life, but even with a desire to die. When they noticed that I demonstrated a certain apprehension toward death, this gave further credence to their belief that I could not be a man because I lacked the principles of true reasoning. My old man spoke to me of this several times; the following are more or less the reasons he gave.

“We are different from beasts in that, since their understanding cannot penetrate into the depths of things, they draw consequences only from what is apparent to them. Thus they flee from their destruction as their greatest evil, and take pains for their survival as their greatest good, without considering the fact that these pains are in vain and that, as they will necessarily perish, to delay their perishing is merely to increase their suffering.

“To reason in depth, we must consider ourselves to be in a state of misery, in the first place because our actions are attached to a heavy body, and thus the more we act, the more we suffer. Our suffering can only cease when our actions cease – so, frankly, to desire to live is to wish to cause oneself pain, and to seek death is to aspire to rest and be exempt from suffering. This is even more true in that it is necessary for us to die, and to delay this only serves to cause us greater troubles.

“As we are only able to see ourselves as perishing objects, the idea that there is nothing dearer to us than ourselves causes us to languish rather than to live and to admit that it would be better not to exist at all than to exist with the knowledge of our imminent demise. Self-preservation is useless since death is inevitable, and delaying it merely serves to increase our regrets. The sight of our perfections causes us even more torment, for we can only consider them as fleeting possessions which cost us a great deal, only to be immediately lost. In the end, everything we observe within and outside of us only brings us pain and indignation.”

I told him that this reasoning seemed to prove too much, that to give full credence to it I would have to be sad to know of something which transcended me. This seemed all the more reproachable in that good judgment consisted in being able to be content with one’s condition and to keep at bay those thoughts which only caused us pain, especially if they had to do with things we could not remedy.

“Your argument is solid in some respects,” he replied, “but it has two major flaws: first, in implying that one can suspend one’s judgment; and second, that one can love oneself without abhorring one’s dissolution. To be capable of the first would be to see things clearly except for what is perpetually before our eyes. To be capable of the second would be to love oneself without hating one’s demise.

“It is a great weakness to be able to live without being continually struck by the fact of one’s demise. It is an even greater one to fear what one knows will occur without fail. But the greatest weakness is to attempt to prevent what one knows is inevitable. To be able to exist without seeing death is to be able to live without knowing oneself. For death is inseparable from us, and to see ourselves in our totality is to see nothing that is not mortal. To fear death is to hold two contradictory feelings at once: it implies both a certainty and an uncertainty that death will undoubtedly come. Worse still is to take preventative measures to deter it, knowing full well that this is impossible.”

I replied that we could justifiably fear not death itself, but its approach, and that these preventative measures were at least useful to temporarily ward off the latter.

“Very well,” he said, “but do you not see that, death being inevitable, its delay can only cause a succession of hardships, sorrows, troubles, and that this would only amount to burdening oneself in order to increase one’s misery?”

I added that this reasoning would have much more weight among the Europeans than in their land, where suffering is unknown, whereas the life of a European is a veritable succession of miseries.

“What?” he exclaimed. “Do you suffer from other infirmities besides being mortal and knowing you are dying?”

I assured him that we were often on the verge of death many times before finally dying, and that death only came to Europeans through illnesses which overwhelmed them and struck them down. This response was a mystery to him; he thought I was referring to the infighting which we had spoken of earlier. Attempting to explain to him our gouts, our migraines, our colics, I saw that he did not know what I was referring to. In order to get him to comprehend, I had to explain in detail some of the illnesses we suffer from.

Once he understood, he remarked: “Is it possible to love such a life?”

I told him that not only did we love it, but we did everything we could to prolong it. This gave him a new occasion to denounce us for insentience or else intolerable extravagance, arguing that to be certain of death, to watch oneself dying through suffering, to be unable to live on except with continual lassitude, and to still seek to ward off immediate death are behaviors which are inconceivable in reasonable minds.

“Our sentiments are far removed from such ways of thinking,” he added. “We are obliged to love ourselves, so as soon as we come to know ourselves and consider ourselves the necessary victims of a superior cause which takes pleasure in our destruction, we have the utmost contempt for our lives, which we view as external, transitory possessions. The time that we have to preserve them is a burden to us, serving only to make us regret possessions which are taken from us more easily than they were given to us. In the end, we grow weary of living, for we dare not become attached to ourselves as tenderly as we could – just as someone who has a charming room for a short time would be afraid to grow fond of it lest he suffer too much when forced to leave it.”

I told him that nature taught us that being was preferable to nothing, and that it was better to live even for only a day than not to live at all. But he responded with a force which I will later explain.

“We must distinguish between two aspects of our being,” he said. “One is its general existence, which never perishes; the other is its particular existence, which does. The first is better than its absence, and is what one absolutely must be referring to when one says that being is preferable to nonbeing. The second is often worse than its absence, especially if knowledge of it only makes us miserable.”

I countered that if being in general was better than nonbeing, it followed that being in particular was worth more than its negation. But he rejoined by invoking my own previous state:

“Pray tell me,” he said, “when you thought yourself alone in the places which you mentioned to us, surrounded by death on all sides, were you able to believe then that your life was a boon, to be valued more than its absence? Is it not true that your knowledge of it only made you miserable, and that you would have preferred to have been insensitive to those feelings of misery? Thus it is useless to opine that knowledge is a good thing, for the knowledge which afflicts me is not merely not good for me, but is an evil I must avoid.

“It is this principle which leads to our true misery in this world, and our great disgust in residing here. We consider what we are and what we ought to be; we know we are highly noble and perfect, worthy of eternal life. We see that, notwithstanding this excellence, we are dependent on countless elements which are greatly beneath us, and we are subject to the liberties of a Sovereign which created us only to transform us when and how it pleases, and whose omnipotence consists in destroying us as much as in causing us to excel. T his is what saddens and vexes us, what causes us to be more inclined not to exist than to be so elevated: to see ourselves treated as poorly – if not more so – as the most wretched, abject creatures. We see ourselves as people who are raised up only to be made more miserable, to be treated worse than beasts. And one would have to be more insensible than a beast not to be persuaded of this.

“Our ancestors were so convinced of this truth that they sought to die in haste. And as our land was becoming deserted, some found reasons to convince those who remained to spare themselves for a time. They demonstrated to them that they ought not let such a grand and beautiful land go to waste, that we were an ornament of the universe and should seek to please the Original Sovereign in every way. Some time later, to f ill all the vacancies, individuals were required to present up to three children to the hebs. Once the land was finally repopulated, around one hundred and fifty years ago, they moderated this obligation such that no one was allowed his great rest without having presented a lieutenant. If he did not have a natural son, he had to find one somewhere else. Only twenty-nine years ago, a hab assembly ruled that a person could not seek permission to cease to exist unless he was at least one hundred years old or else had a visible wound which weakened or ruined his body.”

At this point two other brothers joined us, to my great regret, as the philosopher had never seemed as disposed to indulge my curiosity as he did then.

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The Known Southern Land is available now from Spurl Editions. You can order a copy here.

Gabriel de Foigny was a French writer best known for The Known Southern Land. He was born around 1630 in Picardy, France, and began his adult life as a monk in a strict Franciscan order, from which he was expelled for loose morals. He arrived defrocked in Geneva, where he renounced Catholicism and became a Protestant. But Geneva’s two main religious bodies also accused him of being a libertine. Regardless, he published several linguistic and theological texts and started a family. In 1676, he authored The Known Southern Land, which he claimed was a factual account written by Nicolas Sadeur that he had come across at a bookseller’s in Clermont, France, and translated from Latin. This claim led to his imprisonment on charges of perjury and impiety, with the city’s Calvinist authorities trying and failing to ban the work. After further legal troubles and Foigny’s reconversion to Catholicism, he fled to a monastery in Savoy, where he died in 1692.

Dana J. Lupo is a writer and French translator. Lupo’s translation of Arthur’s Whims by Hervé Guibert was published by Spurl Editions in 2021.