ue o e Obscure a ie Maurice Blanchot See cage caeThomas the Obscure Maurice Blanchot Translated by Robert Lamberton Station Hill PressEnglish translation copyright © 1973, 1988 by Robert Lamberton. Originally published in New York by David Lewis, Inc. (1973). All rights reserved. Originally a French text published as Thomas l'obscur in Patis, France. Copyright © 1941 by Editions Gallimard. Published by Station Hill Press, Barrytown, New York 12507, with partial Financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency in Washington D.C., and the New York State Council on the Arts. Produced by the Institute for Publishing Arts, Barrytown, New York 12507, a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, organization. Cover designed by Susan Quasha and George Quasha. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blanchot, Maurice. Thomas Fobseue. English} ‘Thomas the obscure / by Maurice Blanchot. —New version / ‘ransated by Robert Lamberton. Pp. cm. ‘Translation of Thomas Nobscur ISBN 0-88268.077-3 ISBN 0-88268.076-5 (pbk.) 1. Tile. PQ2603.133437S13 1988 88-20051 B4Y.912--de19 cP Manufactured in the United States of America, There is, for every work, an infinity of possible variants. The present version adds nothing to the pages entitled Thomas the Obscure begun in 1932, delivered to the publisher in May of 1940 and pub- lished in 1941, but as it subtracts a good deal from them, it may be said to be another, and even an entirely new version, but identical at the same time, if one is right in making no distinction between the figure and that which is, or believes itself to be, its center, whenever the complete figure itself expresses no more than the search for an imag- ined center.‘Tuomas sat DOWN and looked at the sea. He remained motion- ess for a time, as ifhe had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers and, although the fog prevented him from secing very far, he stayed there, obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies floating with difficulty. Then, when a more pow- erful wave reached him, he went down onto the sloping sand and slipped among the currents, which quickly immersed him. ‘The sea was calm, and Thomas was in the habit of swimming for long periods without tiring, But today he had chosen a new route, The fog hid the shore. A cloud had come down upon the sea and the surface was lost in a glow which seemed the only truly real thing. Currents shook him, though without giving him the feeling of being in the midst of the waves and of rolling in familiar elements. The conviction that there was, in fact, no ‘water at all made even his effort to swim into a frivolous exer~ cise from which he drew nothing but discouragement. Perhaps he should only have had to get control of himself to drive away such thoughts, but his eye found nothing to cling to, and it seemed to him that he was staring into the void with the in- tention of finding help there. It was then that the sea, driven by the wind, broke loose. The storm tossed it, scattered it into in accessible regions; the squalls turned the sky upside down and, at the same time, there reigned a silence and a calm which gave the impression that everything was already destroyed. Thomas sought to free himself from the insipid flood which was invad- ing him. A piercing cold paralyzed his arms. The water swirled in whirlpools. Was it actually water? One moment the foam leapt before his eyes in whitish flakes, the next the absence of water took hold of his body and drew it along violently. His breathing became slower; fora few momentshe held in his mouth 7the liquid which the squalls drove against his head: a tepid sweetness, strange brew of a man deprived of the sense of taste. ‘Then, whether from fatigue or for an unknown reason, his limbs gave him the same sense of foreignness as the water in which they were tossed. This feeling seemed almost pleasant at first. As he swam, he pursued a sort of revery in which he con- fased himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himselfiin the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort. And even when this ideal sea which he was becoming ever mote intimately had in tum become the rea sea, in which he was virtually drowned, he ‘was not moved as he should have been: of course, there was something intolerable about swimming this way, aimlessly, with a body which was of no use to him beyond thinking that he was swimming, but he also experienced a sense of relief, as if he had finally discovered the key to the situation, and, as far as lhe was concemed, it all came down to continuing his endless Journey, with an absence of organism in an absence of sea. The illusion did not last. He was forced to roll from one side to the other, like a boat adrift, in the water which gave him a body to swim, What escape was there? To struggle in order not to be carried away by the wave which was his arm? To go under? To drown himself bitterly in himself? That would surely have been the moment to stop, but a hope remained; he went on swimming as if, deep within the restored core of his being, he had discovered a new possibility. He swam, a monster without fins. Under the giant microscope, he tumed himself into an enterprising mass of cilia and vibrations. The temptation took ‘on an entirely bizarre character when he sought to slip from the drop of water into a region which was vague and yet infinitely 8 precise, a sort of holy place, so perfectly suited to him that it was enough for him to be there, to be; it was like an imaginary hollow which he entered because, before he was there, his im- print was there already. And so he made a lst effort to fit com- pletely inside. It was easy; he encountered no obstacles; he re~ joined himself; he blended with himself, entering into this place ‘which no one else could penetrate. ‘At last he had to come back. He found his way easily and his feet touched bottom at a place which some of the swimmers used for diving. The fatigue was gone. He still had a humming in his ears and a burning in his eyes, as might be expected after staying too long in the salt water. He became conscious of this as, turning toward the infinite sheet of water reflecting the sun, he tried to tell in which dicection he had gone. At that point, there was a real mist before his sight, and he could pick out absolutely anything in this murky void which his gaze pene- trated feverishly. Peering out, he discovered a man who was swimming far off, nearly lost below the horizon. At such a distance, the swimmer was always escaping him. He would see him, then lose sight of him, though he had the feeling that he vwas following his every move: not only perceiving him clearly all the time, but being brought near him in a completely in- timate way, such that no other sort of contact could have brought him closer. He stayed a long time, watching and wait- ing, There was in this contemplation something painful which resembled the manifestation of an excessive freedom, a free~ dom obtained by breaking every bond. His face clouded over and took on an unusual expression.HE NEVERTHELESS DECIDED to tum his back to the sea and entered a small woods where he lay down after taking a few steps. The day was about to end; scarcely any light remained, but it was still possible to see certain details of the landscape fairly clearly, in particular the hill which limited the horizon and which was glowing, unconcemed and free. What was disturbing to Thomas ‘was the fact that he was lying there in the grass with the desire to remain there for a long time, although this position was for- bidden to him. As night was falling he tried to get up, and, pushing against che ground with both hands, got one knee under him while the other leg dangled; then he made a sudden lurch and succeeded in placing himself entirely erect. So he was stand ing. As a matter of fact, there was an indecision in his way of being which cast doubt on what he was doing. And so, although his eyes were shut, it did not seem that he had given up seeing in the darkness, rather the contrary. Likewise, when he began to walk, one might have thought that it was not his legs, but rather his desire not to walk which pushed him forward. He went down into a sort of vault which at first he had believed to be rather large, but which very soon seemed to him extremely cramped: in front, in back, overhead, wherever he put out his hands, he collided brutally with a surface as hard as a stone wall; on all sides his way was barred, an insurmountable wall all around, and this wall was not the greatest obstacle for he had also to reckon on his will which was fiercely determined to let him sleep there in a passivity exactly like death. This was insane; in his uncertainty, feeling out the limits of the vaulted pit, he placed his body right up against the wall and waited. What dominated him was the sense of being pushed forward by his refusal to advance. So he was not very surprised, so clearly did 33his anxiety allow him to see into the future, when, a litde later, he saw himself carried a few steps further along. A few steps: it was unbelievable. His progress was undoubtedly more apparent than real, for this new spot was indistinguishable from the last, he encountered the same difficulties here, and it was in a sense the same place that he was moving away from out of terror of leaving it. At that moment, Thomas had the rashness to look around himself The night was more somber and more painful than he could have expected. The darkness immersed every- thing; there was no hope of passing through its shadows, but ‘one penetrated its reality in a relationship of overwhelming in- timacy. His first observation was that he could still use his body, and particularly his eyes; it was not that he saw anything, but what he looked at eventually placed him in contact with a noc- tumal mass which he vaguely perceived to be himself and in which he was bathed. Naturally, he formulated this remark only as a hypothesis, asa convenient point of view, but one to which he was obliged to have recourse only by the necessity of un- aveling new circumstances. As he had no means of measuring time, he probably took some hours before accepting this way of ooking at things, but, for him, it was as if fear had immediately conquered him, and it was with a sense of shame that he raised his head to accept the idea he had entertained: outside himself there was something identical to his own thought which his glance or his hand could touch. Repulsive fantasy. Soon the night seemed to him gloomier and more terrible than any night, as if it had in fact issued from a wound of thought which had ceased to think, of thought taken ironically as object by some thing other than thought. It was night itself. Images which con- stituted its darkness inundated him, He saw nothing, and, far 4 from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the cul- mination of his sight. Useless for seeing, his eye took on extra- ordinary proportions, developed beyond measure, and, stretch- ing out on the horizon, let the night penetrate its center in ordet to receive the day from it. And so, through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it appre- hended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which pre- vented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image. New pre- ‘occupations came out of this for Thomas. His solicade no longer seemed so complete, and he even had the feeling that something real had knocked against him and was trying to slip inside. Per- haps he might have been able to interpret this feeling in some other way, but he always had to assume the worst, What ex- ccuses him is the fact that the impression was so clear and so painful chat it was almost impossible not to give way to it. Even if he had questioned its truth, he would have had the greatest difficulty in not believing that something extreme and violent was happening, for from all evidence a foreign body had lodged itselfin his pupil and was attempting to go further. It wasstrange, absolutely disturbing, all the more disturbing because it was not a small object, but whole trees, the whole woods sill quivering and fall of life. He felt this as a weakness which did him no credit. He no longer even paid attention to the details of events. Pethaps a man slipped in by the same opening, he could neither have affirmed nor denied it. It seemed to him that the waves were invading the sore of abyss which was himself. All this pre- occupied him only slightly. He had no attention for anything but his hands, busy recognizing the beings mingled with him- 45self, whose character they discerned by parts, a dog represented by an ear, a bird replacing the tree on which it sang. Thanks to these beings which indulged in acts which escaped all interpre- tation, edifices, whole cities were built, real cities made of empti- ness and thousands of stones piled one on another, creatures rolling in blood and tearing arteries, playing the role of what ‘Thomas had once called ideas and passions. And so fear took hold of him, and was in no way distinguishable from his corpse. Desire was this same corpse which opened its eyes and knowing itself to be dead climbed awkwardly back up into his mouth like an animal swallowed alive. Feelings occupied him, then devoured him, He was pressed in every part of his flesh by a thousand hands which were only his hand. A mortal anguish beat against his heart. Around his body, he knew that his thought, mingled with the night, kept watch. He knew with terrible certainty that it, too, was looking for a way to enter into him. Against his lips, in his mouth, it was forcing its way to- ‘ward a monstrous union, Beneath his eyelids, it created a neces- sary sight. And at the same time it was furiously destroying the face it kissed. Prodigious cities, ruined fortresses disappeared, The stones were tossed outside. The trees were transplanted, Hands and corpses were taken away. Alone, the body of Thomas remained, deprived of its senses. And thought, having entered him again, exchanged contact with the void, IIIHe cana sack to the hotel for dinner. Of course, he could have taken his usual place atthe main table, but he chose not to and kept to one side. Eating, at this point, was not without im- portance. On the one hand, it was tempting because he was demonstrating that he was still frce to tum back; but on the coher hand, it was bad because he risked recovering his freedom con too narrow a foundation. So he preferred to adopt a less frank attitude, and took a few steps forward to see how the others would accept his new manner. AC first he listened; there was a confused, crude noise which one moment would become very loud and then lessen and become imperceptible. Yes, there was no mistake about it, it was the sound of conversation and, moreover, when the talking became quieter, he began to recog- nize some very simple words which seemed to be chosen so that he might understand them more easily. Still, unsatisfied by the ‘words, he wanted to confront the people facing him, and made his way toward the table: once there, he remained silent, look- ing at these people who all seemed to him to have a certain importance. He was invited to sit down. He passed up the invi- tation, They encouraged him more strongly and an elderly woman tumed to him asking if he had swum that afternoon. ‘Thomas answered yes. There was a silence: a conversation was possible, then? Yet what he had said must not have been very satisfying, for the woman looked at him with a reproachful air and got up slowly, like someone who, not having been able to finish her task, has some sort of regret; however, this did not prevent her from giving the impression by her departure that sheabandonedherrole very willingly. Withoutthinking, Thomas took the free place, and once seated on a chair which seemed to him surprisingly low, but comfortable, he no longer dreamed of 19anything but being served the meal which he had just refused. ‘Wasn'tit too late? He would have liked to consult dhowe present fon this point. Obviously, they were not showing themselves openly hostile toward him, he could even count on their good- will, without which he would have been incapable of remaining s0 much asa second in the room; but there was in their ateude also something underhanded which did not encourage confi- dence, nor even any sort of communication. As he observed his neighbor, Thomas was struck by her: a tall, blonde girl whose beauty awoke as he looked at her. She had seemed very pleased when he came to sit down beside her, but now she held her- self with a sort of stiffness, with a childish wish to keep apart, all the stranger because he was moving closer to get some sign of encouragement from her. He nevertheless continued to stare at her, for, bathed in a superb light, her entire person drew him. Having heard someone call her Anne (in a very sharp tone), and seeing that she immediately raised her head, ready to answer, he decided to act and, with all his strength, struck the table. Tacti- cal error, no doubt about it, unfortunate move: the result was immediate. Everyone, as if offended by a foolish action which could be tolerated only by ignoring it, closed themselves offin a reserve against which nothing could be done. Hours might pass now without rekindling the slightest hope, and the greatest proofs of docility were doomed to failure, as were all a at rebellion. And so it seemed the game was lost. It was then that, to precipitate matters, Thomas began to stare at each of them, even those who tumed away, even those who, when their glance met his, looked at him now less than ever. No one would have been in a mood to put up for very long with this empty, demanding stare, asking for no one knew what, and wandering 20 without control, but his neighbor took it particularly badly: she got up, arranged her hait, wiped her face and prepared to leave in silence. How tired her movements were! Just a moment ago, it was the light bathing her face, the highlights of her dress which made her presence so comforting, and now this bril- Hance was fading away. All that remained was a being whose fragility appeared in her faded beauty and who was even losing all reality, as if the contours of the body had been outlined not by the light, but by a diffuse phosphorescence emanating, one might believe, from the bones. No encouragement was to be hoped for any longer from her. Persevering indecently in this contemplation, one could only sink deeper and deeper into a feeling of loneliness where, however far one wished to go, one would only lose oneself and continue to lose oneself. Neverthe- less, Thomas refused to let himself be convinced by simple im- pressions. He even tured back deliberately toward the gil (al- though he had really not taken his eyes off her). Around him, everyone was getting up from the table in a disagreeable dis- order and confusion. He rose as well, and, in the room which was now plunged in deep shadow, measured with his eye the space he had to cross to get to the door. At this moment, every- thing lic up, the electric lights shone, illuminating the vestibule, shining outside where it scemed one must enter asifinto a warm, soft thickness. At the same moment, the git! called him from outside in a determined tone, almost too loud, which had a domineering ring, though it was impossible to tell whether this impression came from the order given or only from the voice which took it too seriously. Thomas was very sensitive to this invitation and his first impulse was to obey, rushing into the empty space. Then, when the silence had absorbed the call, he aaws longer sre of ving relly beard his ame and he con- tented himself with listening in the hope that he would be called again. As he listened, he thought about the distance of all these people, their absolute dumbness, their indifference. It was sheer childishness to hope to see all these distances suppressed by a single cal. Irwas even humiliating and dangerous. Atthat point, he raised his head and, having assured himself that everyone had departed, he in tum left the room. 22 IV‘Twomas stave in his room to read. He was siting with his hands joined over his brow, his thumbs pressing against his hair- line, so deep in concentration that he did not make a move when anyone opened the door. Those who came in thought he was pretending to read, seeing that the book was always open to the same page. He was reading. He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention. In relation to every symbol, he ‘was in the position of the male praying mantis about to be de- voured by the female. They looked at each other. The words, coming forth from the book which was tiking on the power of lifeand death, exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the glance which played over them. Each of them, like a hal closed eye, admitted the excessively keen glance which in other circumstances it would not have tolerated. And so Thomas slipped toward these corridors, approaching them defenselessly tuntil the moment he was perceived by the very quick of the word. Even this was not fearful, but rather an almost pleasant moment he would have wished to prolong. The reader con- templated this litde spark of life joyfully, not doubting that he had awakened it. It was with pleasure that he saw himselfin this eye looking at him. The pleasure in fact became very great. It became so great, so pitiless that he bore it with a sort of terror, and in the intolerable moment when he had stood forward without receiving from his interlocutor any sign of complicity, he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word asif bya living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the ab- solute. Rather than withdraw from a text whose defenses were asso strong, he pitted all his strength in the will to seize it, obsti- nately refusing to withdraw his glance and still thinking him- selfa profound reader, even when the words were already tak- ing hold of him and beginning to read him. He was seized, kneaded by intelligible hands, bitten by a vital tooth; he entered with his living body into the anonymous shapes of words, giv- ing his substance to them, establishing their relationships, of- fering his being to the word “be”. For hours he remained motionless, with, from time to time, the word “eyes” in place of his eyes: he was inert, captivated and unveiled. And even later when, having abandoned himself and, contemplating his book, he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word J were beginning their camage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply. ‘The first time he perceived this presence, it was night. By a light which came down through the shutters and divided the bed in two, he saw that the room was totally empty, so incap- able of containing a single object that it was painful co the eye. The book was rotting on the table. There was no one walking in the room. His solitude was complete. And yet, sure as he was that there was no one in the room and even in the world, he was just as sure that someone was there, occupying his slumber, approaching him intimately, all around him and within him. On a naive impulse he sat up and sought to penetrate the night, trying with his hand to make light. But he was like a blind man who, hearing a noise, might run to light his lamp: nothing could make it possible for him to seize this presence in any shape 26 or form, He was locked in combat with something inaccessible, foreign, something of which he could say: That doesn’t exist... and which nevertheless filled him with terror as he sensed it wandering about in the region of his solitude. Having stayed up all night and all day with this being, as he tried to rest he was suddenly made aware that a second had replaced the firs, just as inaccessible and just as obscure, and yet different. It was a modulation of that which did not exist, a different mode of be- ing absent, another void in which he was coming to life. Now it was definitely true, someone was coming near him, standing not nowhere and everywhere, but a few feet away, invisible and certain. By an impulse which nothing might stop, and which nothing might quicken, a power with which he could not ac- cept contact was coming to meet him, He wanted to flee. He threw himself into the corridor. Gasping and almost beside him- self, he had taken only a few steps when he rerogined the = itable progress of the being coming toward him, He went feckinee ‘room. He barricaded the door. He waited, his back to the wall, But neither minutes nor hours put an end to his ‘waiting, He felt ever closer to an ever more monstrous absence which took an infinite time to meet. He felt it closer to him every instant and kept ahead of it by an infinitely small but ir- reducible splinter of duration. He saw it, a horrifying being which was already pressing against him in space and, existing outside time, remained infinitely distant. Such unbearable wait- ing and anguish that chey separated him from himself, A sort of Thomas left his body and went before the lurking threat. His eyes tried to look not in space but in duration, and in a point in time which did not yet exist. His hands sought to touch an impalpable and unreal body. It was such a painful effort that 27this thing which was moving away from him and trying to draw him along as it went seemed the same to him as that which ‘was approaching unspeakably. He fell to the ground. He felt he was covered with impurities, Each part of his body endured an agony. His head was forced to touch the evi, his lungs to breathe it in, There he was on the floor, writhing, reentering himself and then leaving again. He crawled sluggishly, hardly different from the serpent he would have wished to become in order to believe in the venom he felt in his mouth, He stuck his head under the bed, in a comer fall of dust, resting among the reject- amenta as ifin a refreshing place where he felt he belonged more properly than in himself. Ie was in this state that he felt himself bitten or struck, he could not tell which, by what seemed to him to be a word, but resembled rather a giant rat, an all-powerful beast with piercing eyes and pure teeth. Seeing it a few inches from his face, he could not escape the desire to devour it, to bring ic into the deepest possible intimacy with himselé He threw himself on it and digging his fingernails into its entrails, sought to make i his own. The end of the night came, The light which shone through the shutters went out. But the struggle with the horrible beast, which had ultimately shown itself pos- sessed of incomparable dignity and splendor, continued for an immeasurable time. This struggle was terrible for the being ly- ing on the ground grinding his teeth, twisting his face, tearing out his eyes to force the beast inside; he would have seemed a madman, had he resembled a man at all. It was almost beautiful for this dark angel covered with red hair, whose eyes sparkled. ‘One moment, the one thought he had triumphed and, with un— containable nausea, saw the word “innocence”, which soiled him, slipping down inside him. The next moment, the other 28 was devouring him in tum, dragging him out of the hole he had come from, then tossing him back, a hard, emptied body. Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, be- came entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake. 29‘Towaxp THs mappze of the second night, Thomas got up and went silently downstairs. No one noticed him with the excep- tion of a nearly blind cat who, seeing the night change shape, ran after this new night which he did not see. After slipping into tunnel where he did not recognize a single smell, chis cat began to meow, forcing out from deep in his chest the raucous cry by which cats make it understood that they are sacred animals. He filled his lungs and howled. He drew from the idol he was be- coming the incomprehensible voice which addressed itself to the night and spoke. “What is happening?” said this voice. “The spirits with which Tam usually in communication, the spirit that tugs at my tail when the bowl is full, che spirit chat gets me up in the morning and puts me to bed in a soft comforter, and the most beautiful spirit of all, che one that meows and purrs and resembles me so closely that itis ike my own spirit: they have all disappeared. ‘Where am I now? If1 feel gently with my paw, I find nothing. ‘There's nothing anywhere. I'm at the very end of a gutter from which I can only fall. And that wouldn’t scare me, falling. But the truth is chat I can’e even fill; no fill is possible; I am sur- rounded by a special void which repels me and which I wouldn't know how to cross over. Where am I then? Poor me. Once, by suddenly becoming a beast which might be cast into the fire with impunity, I used to penetrate secrets of the first order. By the flash of light which divided me, by the stroke of my claw, I knew lies and crimes before they were committed. And now I am a dull-eyed creature. I hear a monstrous voice by means of which I say what I say without knowing a single word of tall. I think, and my thoughts are 2s useless to me as hair standing on end or touching ears would be to the alien species I depend 33upon, Horror alone penetrates me. I turn round and round crying the cry of a terrible beast. I have a hideous affliction: my face feels as large as.a spirits face, with a smooth, insipid tongue, a blind man’s tongue, a deformed nose incapable of prophecy, enormous eyes without that straight flame which permits us to ‘sce things in ourselves. My coat is splitting. That is doubtless the final operation. As soon as it is no longer possible even in this night, to draw a supernatural light from me by stroking my hair, it will be the end. I am already darker than the shadows. I am the night of night. Through the shadows from which I am distinguished because I am their shadow, I go to meet the over- cat. There is no fear in me now. My body, which is just like the body of a man, the body of the blessed, has kept its dimensions, but my head is enormous. There is a sound, a sound I have never heard before. A glow which seems to come from my body, though it is damp and lifeless, makes a circle around me which is. like another body which I cannot leave. I begin to see a land~ scape. As the darkness becomes more oppressive, a great pallid figure rises before me. I say ‘me,’ guided by a blind instinct, for ‘ever since I lost the good, straight tail which was my rudder in this world, 1am manifestly no longer myself. This head which will not stop growing, and rather than a head seems nothing but a glance, just what is it? I can’t look at it without uneasiness. It's moving. It's coming closer. It is turned directly toward me and, pure glance though it is, it gives me the terrible impression that it doesn’t see me. This feeling is unbearable. If I still had any hair, I would feel it standing up all over my body. But in my condition Ino longer have even the means to experience the fear I feel. 1am dead, dead. This head, my head, no longer even sees me, because I am annihilated. For it is I looking at myself and 34 not perceiving myself. Oh over-cat whom Ihave become for an instant to establish the fact of my decease, I shall now disappear for good. First ofall, I cease being a man. Tagain become a cold, uninhabitable litle cat stretched out on the earth. I howl one more time. I take a last look at this vale which is about to be closed up, and where I see a man, himself an over-cat as well. I hear him scratching the ground, probably with his claws. What is called the beyond is finished for me.” ‘Onis knees, his back bent, Thomas was digging in the earth. ‘Around him extended several ditches on the edges of which the day was packed down, For the seventh time, leaving the mark of his hands in the soil, he was slowly preparing a great hole, which he was enlarging to his size. And while he was digging it, the hole, asifithad been filled by dozens of hands, then by arms and finally by the whole body, offered a resistance to his work which soon became insurmountable. The tomb was fall of a being whose absence it absorbed. An immovable corpse was lodged there, finding in this absence of shape the perfect shape of its presence. It was a drama the horror of which was fele by the village folk in their slecp. As soon as the grave was finished, when Thomas threw himself into it with a huge stone tied around his neck, he crashed into a body a thousand times harder than the sol, the very body of the gravedigger who had already entered the grave to dig it. This grave which was exactly his size, his shape, his thickness, was like his own corpse, and every time he tried to bury himself in it, he was like a ridiculous dead person trying to bury his body in his body. There was, then, henceforth, in all the sepulchers where he might have been able to take his place, in all the feelings which are also tombs for the dead, in this annihilation through which he was dying without 35permitting himself to be thought dead, there was another dead person who was there first, and who, identical with himself, drove the ambiguity of Thomas's life and death to the extreme Jimit. In this subterranean night into which he had descended with cats and the dreams of cats, a double wrapped in bands, its senses sealed with the seven seas, its spirit absent, occupied his place, and this double was the unique one with which no com- promise was possible, since it was the same as himself, realized in the absolute void. He leaned over this glacial comb. Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave, even so Thomas felt himself, at the moment he knew himself to be dead, absent, complecely absent from his death. Neither his body, which left in the depths of himself that coldness which comes from contact with a corpse and which is not coldness but absence of contact, nor the darkness, which seeped from all his pores and even when he was visible made it impossible to use any sense, intuition or thought to see him, nor the fact chat by no right could he pass for living, sufficed to make him pass for dead. And it was not a misunderstanding. He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death. In death itself, he was deprived of death, a horribly destroyed man, stop- ped in the midst of nothingness by his own image, by this Thomas running before him, bearer of extinguished torches, who was like the existence of the very last death. Already, as he still leaned over this void where he saw his image in the total absence of images, seized by the most violent vertigo possible, a 36 vertigo which did not make him fall but prevented him from falling and rendered impossible the fall ic rendered inevitable, already the earth was shrinking around him and night, a night which no longer responded to anything, which he did not see and whose reality he sensed only because it was less real than ‘himself, surrounded him. In every way, he was invaded by the feeling of being at the heart of things. Even on the surface of this earth which he could not penetrate, he was within this earth, whose insides touched him on all sides. On all sides, night closed him in. He saw, he heard the core of an infinity where he was bound by the very absence of limits. He feleas an oppressive existence the nonexistence of this valley of death. Litde by litele the emanations of an acrid and damp leaf-mold reached him. Like a man waking up alive in his coffin, terrified, he saw the impalpable earth where he floated transformed into an air with- ‘out air, filled with smells of the earth, of rotten wood, of damp cloth. Now truly buried, he discovered himself, beneath accum- ulated layers of a material resembling plaster, in 2 hole where he ‘was smothering. He was soaked in an icy medium among ob- Jjects which were crushing him. If he still existed, it was to recognize the impossibility of living again, here in this room fall of funereal flowers and spectral light. Suffocating, he man- aged to breathe again. He again discovered the possibility of walking, of seeing, of crying out, deep within a prison where he was confined in impenetrable silence and darkness. What a strange horror was his, as, passing the last barriers, he appeared at the narrow gate of his sepulcher, not risen but dead, and with the certainty of being snatched at once from death and from life. He walked, a painted mummy; he looked at the sun which ‘was making an effort to put a smiling, lively expression on its 37indifferent face. He walked, the only true Lazarus, whose very death was resurrected. He went forward, passing beyond the last shadows of night without losing any of his glory, covered with grass and earth, walking at an even pace beneath the falling stars, the same pace which, for those men who are not wrapped in a winding-sheet, marks the ascent toward the most precious point in life. 38 VIANNE SAW HIM coming without surprise, this inevitable being in whom she recognized the one she might try in vain to escape, but would meet again every day. Each time, he came straight to her, following with an inflexible pace a path laid straight over the sca, the forests, even the sky. Each time, when the world was emptied of everything but the sun and this motionless being standing at her side, Anne, enveloped in his silent immobility, carried away by this profound insensitivity which revealed her, feeling all the calm of the universe condensing in her through him, just as the sparkling chaos of the ultimate noon was re- sounding, mingled with the silence, pressed by the greatest peace, not daring t0 make a move or to have a thought, seeing herself burned, dying, her eyes, her checks aflame, mouth half open exhaling, as a last breath, her obscure forms into the glare of the sun, perfeccy transparent in death beside this opaque corpse which stood by, becoming ever more dense, and, more silent than silence, undermined the hours and deranged time. A just and sovereign death, inhuman and shamefal moment which ‘began anew each day, and from which she could not escape. Each day he returned at the same time to the same place. And it ‘was precisely the same moment, the same garden as well. With the ingenuousness of Joshua stopping the sun to gain time, Anne believed that things were going on. But the terrible trees, dead in their green foliage which could not dry out, the birds which flew above her without, alas, deceiving anyone or succeeding in making themselves pass for living, stood solemn guard over the horizon and made her begin again eternally the scene she had lived the day before. Nevertheless, chat day (as ifa corpse borne from one bed to another were really changing place) she arose, walked before Thomas and drew him toward the litde woods atnearby, along a road on which those who came from the other direction saw him recede, or thought he was motionless. In fact, he was really walking and, with a body like the others, though three-quarters consumed, he penetrated a region where, if he himself disappeared, he immediately saw the others fall into another nothingness which placed them farther from him than, if they had continued to live. On this road, each man he met died, Each man, if Thomas tumed away his eyes, died with him a death which was not announced by a single cry. He looked at them, and already he saw them lose all resemblance beneath his glance, with a tiny wound in the forehead through which their face escaped. They did not disappear, but they did not appear again, As far away as they became visible, they were shapeless and mute. Nearer, if he couched them, if he directed coward them not his glance, but the glance of this dazzling and invisible eye which he was, every moment, completely . . . and nearer yet, almost blending with them, raking them either for his shadow or for dead souls, breathing them, licking them, coat- ing himself with their bodies, he received not the slightest sen- sation, not che slightest image, as empty of chem as they were empty of him. Finally they passed by. They went away, defin- itively. They slipped down a vertiginous slope toward a coun- try whence nothing was any longer visible, except perhaps, like a great trail of light, ther last phosphorescent stare on the hori- zon. It was a terrible and mysterious blast. Behind him there were no more words, no silence, no backward and no forward. The space surrounding him was the opposite of space, infinite thought in which those who entered, their heads veiled, existed only for nothing. In this abyss Anne alone resisted. Dead, dissolved in the 42 closest thing to the void, she yet found there the debris of beings with whom she maintained, in the midst of the holocaust, a sort of familial resemblance in her features. Ife came straight up to her, brutally, to surprise her, she always presented him a face. She changed without ceasing to be Anne. She was Anne, hav- ing no longer the slightest resemblance to Anne. In her face and in all her features, while she was completely identical to another, she remained the same, Anne, Anne complete and undeniable. On his path, he saw her coming like a spider which was identi- cal to the girl and, among the vanished corpses, the emptied men, walked through the deserted world with a strange peace, last descendant of a fabulous race. She walked with eight enor- mous legs as if on two delicate ones. Her black body, her fero- cious look which made one think she was about to bite when she was about to flee, were not different from the clothed body of Anne, ftom the delicate air she had when one tried to see her close up. She came forward jerkily, now devouring space in a few bounds, now lying down on the path, brooding it, drawing. it from herself like an invisible thread. Without even drawing in her limbs, she entered the space surrounding Thomas. She approached irresistibly. She stopped before him. Then, that day, seized by this incredible bravery and perseverance, recognizing in her something carefree which could not disappear in the midst of trials and which resounded like a memory of freedom, seeing her get up on her long legs, hold herself at the level of his face to communicate with him, secreting a whirlwind of nu- ances, of odors and thoughts, he tured and looked bitterly be- hind him, like a traveler who, having taken a wrong tum, moves away, then draws within himself and finally disappears in the thought of his journey. Yes, this woods, he recognized it. 3‘And this declining sun, he recognized that, and these trees dry ing out and these green leaves tuming black. He tried to shake the enormous weight of his body, a missing body whose illusion he bore like a borrowed body. He needed to feel the factitious warmth which radiated from himself as from an alien sun, to hear the breath owing from a false source, to listen to the beat- ing of a false heart. And her, did he recognize her, this dead person on guard behind a hideous resemblance, ready to appear as she was, in the atmosphere studded with litle mirrors where every one of her features survived? “It’s you?” he asked, Im mediately he saw a flame in a pair of eyes, a sad, cold flame on a face. He shuddered in this unknown body while Anne, feeling a sad spirit entering into her, a funereal youthfulness she was swom to love, believed she was again becoming herself. VIIANNE HAD A FEW DAYS of great happiness. And she had never even dreamed of a simpler happiness, a lovelier tendemess. For her, he was suddenly a being she possessed without danger. If she took hold of him, it was with the greatest freedom. As for his head, he abandoned ie to her. His words, before they were spoken, might as well have been in one mouth 2s the other, so completely did he let her do as she wished. In this way in which Anne played with his entire person and in the absence of risk which permitted her to treat this strange body as if it belonged to her, there was a frivolousness so perilous that anyone would have been pained at it. Bue she saw in him only a futile mouth, empty glances, and, rather than feeling uneasy atthe realization that a man she could not approach, whom she could not dream. cof making speak, consented to roll his head in her lap, she en- Joyed it. It was, on her part, a way to act which was difficult co justify. From one moment to the next one might anticipate, ‘between these bodies bound so intimately together by such frag- ile bonds, a contact which would reveal in a terrible way their lack of bonds. The more he withdrew within himself, the more she came frivolously forward. He attracted her, and she buried herself in the face whose contours she still thought she was ca- ressing. Did she act so imprudently because she thought she was dealing with someone inaccessible, or, on the other hand, with someone too easy to approach? Her stare was fixed on him... was this an impudent game, or a desperate one? Her words be- came moist, even her weakest movements glued her against him, while within her swelled up the pocket of humors fom which she would pethaps, at che proper moment, draw an ex- treme power of adhesion. She covered herself with suction cups. Within and without, she was no more than wounds try- 47ing to heal, flesh being grafted. And, despite such a change, she continued to play and to laugh. As she held out her hand to him she said: “Really, who could you be?” Properly speaking, there was no question in this remark. Dis tracted as she was, how could she have interrogated a being whose existence was a terrible question posed to herself? But she seemed to find it surprising and slightly shocking, yes, really shocking, not yet to be able, not to understand him (which in itself would have been extremely presumptuous), but (and this time the rashness went beyond all limits) co get information about him. And this boldness was not enough for her, for the regret she felt at not knowing him, rather than trying to justify itselfin its bizarre form through the violence and madness of its expression, emerged rather as a relaxed and almost indifferent regret. It was, beneath the benign appearance all such operations have, an actual attempt to tempt God. She looked him right in the face: “But, what are you?” Although she did not expect to hear him answer and even if she were sure that he would not answer she would not in fact have questioned him, there was such a presumption in her man- ner of assuming that he could give an answer (of course, he would not answer, she did not ask him to answer, but, by the question she had posed him personally and relating to his person, she acted as if she might interpret his silence as an accidental re~ fusal to answer, as an attitude which might change one day or another), it was such a crude way to treat the impossible that ‘Anne had suddenly revealed to her the terrible scene she was throwing herself into blindfolded, and in an instant, waking from her sleep, she perceived all the consequences of her act, and the madness of her conduct. Her first thought was to pre~ 48 vent him from answering. For the great danger, now that by an inconsiderate and arbitrary act she had just treated him as a being one might question, was that he might in tum act like a being chat might answer and make his answer under- stood. She felt this threat deposited in the depths of her self, in the place of the words she had spoken. He was already grasping the hand held out to him. He seized it cruelly, giv- ing Anne to believe that he understood her reasons, and that afterall there was in fact a possibility of contact berween them. [Now that she was sure that, pitilesely unrelenting as he was, ifhe spoke he would say everything there was to say without hiding anything from her, telling her everything so that when he stop- ped speaking his silence, the silence of a being that has nothing mote to give and yet has given nothing, would be even more terrifying, now she was sure that he would speak. And this cer- tainty was s0 great that he appeared to her as if he had already spoken. He surrounded her, like an abyss. He revolved about her. He entranced her. He was going to devour her by changing the most unexpected words into words she would no longer be able to expect. “What Iam... .” “Be quiet.” Te was late, and knowing that hours and days no longer con cemed anyone but her, she cried louder in the shadows. She came neat and lay down before the window. Her face melted, and again closed itself. When the darkness was complete, lean- ing in her tattered way toward the one she now called, in her new language drawn from the depths, her friend, without wor- rying about her own state she wanted (like a drunkard with no legs explaining to himself by his drunkenness the fact that he can 49no longer walk), she wanted to see why her relations with this dead man no longer seemed to be advancing. As low as she had fallen, and probably because from that level she perceived that there was a difference between them and a huge difference, but not such that their relationship must always be doomed, she was suddenly suspicious of all the politenesses they had exchanged. In the folds where she hid herself, she told herself with a pro- foundly. sophisticated air that she would not allow herself to be deceived by the appearance of this perfectly lovable young man, and it was with deep pain that she recalled his welcoming man- ner and the ease with which she approached him. If she did not g0 so fir as to suspect him of hypocrisy (she might complain, she might cry miserably because he kept her twenty fathoms below the truth in brilliant and empty words; but itnever came into her head, in spite of her sullen efforts to speak of herself and of him in the same words, that there might be, in what she called the character of Thomas, any duplicity), it was because, just by tuming her head, in the silence in which he necessarily ‘existed, she perceived him to be so impenetrable that she saw clearly how ridiculous it would have been to call him insincere. He did not deceive her, and yet she was deceived by him. Treachery revolved about them, so much the more terrible be- cause it was she who was betraying him, and she was deceiving herself at the same time with no hope of putting an end to this aberration since, not knowing who he was, she always found someone else beside her. Even the night increased her error, even time which made her try again and again without reprieve the same things, which she undertook with a fierce and humili- ated ait, It was a story emptied of events, emptied to the point that every memory and all perspective were eliminated, and 50 drawing from this absence its inflexible direction neh doing fo noe ment toward an imminent catastrophe. What was going to hap- pen? She did not know, but devoting herent lif wo waiting: her impatience melted into the hope of participating ina gen cataclysm in which, at the same time as the beings themselves, the distances which separate beings would be destroyed. stVIIix was mv Tas New stare that, fecling herself becoming an enormous, immeasurable reality on which she fed her hopes, like a monster revealed to no one, not even to herself, she be- came still bolder and, keeping company with Thomas, came to attribute to more and more penetrable motives the difficulties of her relationship with him, thinking, for example, that what was abnormal was that nothing could be discovered about his life and that in every circumstance he remained anonymous and without a history. Once she had started in this direction, there was no chance of her stopping herself in time. It would have been just as well to say whatever came into one’s head with no other intention than to put the words to the test. But, far from condescending to observe these precautions, she saw fit, in a language whose solemnity contrasted with her miserable con- dition, to rise to a height of profanation which hung on the apparent truth of her words. What she said to him took the form of direct speech. It was a cry fall of pride which resounded in the sleepless night with the very character of dream. “Yes,” she said, “I would like to see you when you are alone. Ifever I could be before you and completely absent from you, I would have a chance to meet you. Or rather I know that I would not meet you. The only possibility I would have to dim- inish the distance berween us would be to remove myself to an infinite distance. But I am infinitely far away now, and can go no further. As soon as I touch you, Thomas. ...”” Hardly out of her mouth, these words carried her away: she saw him, he was radiant. Her head thrown back, a soft noise rose from her throat which drove all memories away; there was no need, now, to cry out .. . her eyes closed, her spirit was in- toxicated; her breathing became slow and deep, her hands came 3stogether: this should reasonably have continued forever. But, as if the silence were also an invitation to retum (for it bound her to nothing), she let herself go, opened her eyes, recognized the room and, once again, everything had to be begun anew. This deception, the fact that she did not have the desired ex- planation, lefther unmoved. She certainly could no longer think thathe would reveal to her what was, to her, a sort of secret, and for him had in no way the quality of a secret. On the contrary, clinging to the idea that what she might say would endure, in spite of everything, she was determined to communicate to him the fact that, though she was not unaware of the extraordinary distance which separated them, she would obstinately maintain contact with him to the very end, for, if there was something shameless in her concern to say that what she was doing was insane, and that nevertheless she was doing it fully conscious of the situation, there was something very tempting in it as well. But could one even believe that, infantile as that might be, she could do it on her own? Speak, yes, she could start to speak, with the sense of guile of an accomplice betraying his compan jon, not in admitting what he knows—he knows nothing— but in admitting what he does not know, for she did not have it within her means to say anything true or even apparently truc; and nevertheless what she said, without allowing her to perceive the truth in any sense, without the compensation of throwing the slightest light on the enigma, chained her as heavily, perhaps more heavily, than if she had revealed the very heart of secrets. Far from being able to slip into the lost pathways where she would have had the hope of coming neat to him, she only went astray in her travels and led forth an illusion which, even in her eyes, was only an illusion. Despite the dimming of her perspec $6 tive she suspected that her project was puerile and that farther- ‘more she was committing a great mistake with nothing to gain from it, although she also had this thought (and in fact this was jase che mistake); chat the moment she made a mistake because ‘of him or relating to him, she created between them a link he ‘would have to reckon with. But she nevertheless guessed how dangerous it was to sce in him a being who had experienced events no doubt different from others, but fundamentally anal- ‘ogous toll the others, o plunge him into the same water which flowed over her. It was not, at any event, a small imprudence to mix time, her personal time, with that which detested time, and she knew that no good for her own childhood could emerge from the caricarure—and if the image had been a perfect one it would have been worse—of childhood which would be given by one who could have no historical character. So the uneasiness rose in her, as if time had already been corrupted, as if all her past, again placed in question, had been offered up in a barren and inevitably guilty future. And she could not even console herself in the thought that, since everything she had to say was arbitrary, the risk itself was illusory. On the contrary she knew, she fele, with an anguish which seemed to threaten her very life but which was more precious than her life, that, though she might say nothing true no matter how she might speak, she was exposing herself (in retaining only one version among so many others) to the danger of rejecting seeds of truth which would be sscsifced. And she fl fire, with an anxicry whic cree ened her purity but which brought her a new purity, that she ‘ves going 0 be forced (even if she tried ro cut herself off behind the most arbitrary and most innocent evocation) to introduce something serious into her tale, an impenetrable and terrible 37reminiscence, o that, as this false igure emenged from the shad- ows, acquiring through a useless meticulousness a greater = greater precision and a more and more artificial one, she herself, thenato sey condemned and delivered ino te hands of e devils, would bind herself unpard of which she would know aes ee “What youare....,” shesaid,... Andasshe spoke th she semed to dance around him and, fing his sions time, to push him into an imaginary wolftrap. “What you are... She could not speak, and yet she was speaks vibrated in such a way that she seemed to cay ome of words without the words themselves. Then, suddenly, she let herself be carried away by a rush of words which she pro- nounced almost beneath her breath, with varied inflections, as if she wanted only to amuse herself with sounds and bursts of syllables. She gave the impression that, speaking a language whose infantile character prevented it from being taken for a language, she was making the meaningless words seem like in- comprehensible ones. She said nothing, but to say nothing was forher an all coo meaningfal mode of expression, beneath which she succeeded in saying sill es. She withdtew indefinitely from her babbling to enter into yet another, les serious babbling, which she nevertheless rejected as too serious, preparing herself by an endless retreat beyond all seriousness for repose in absolute puerility, until her vocabulary, through its nullity, took on the appearance of asleep which was the very voice of seriousness. Then, as fin the depths she had suddenly felt herself under the surveillance of an implacable consciousness, she leaped back, cried out, opened terribly clairvoyant eyes and, halting her tale 38 an instant: “No,” shesaid, “it’snot that, What you really are...” ‘She herself took on a puerile and frivolous appearance. From beneath the murky look which had veiled her face for a few moments came forth expressions which made her seem dis- tracted. She presented such a delicate appearance that, looking ather, it was impossible to fix one’s attention on her features, or con the whole of her person. It was that much more difficult to remember what she said and to attach any meaning to it. It was impossible even to know about whom she was talking, One ‘moment she seemed to be talking to Thomas, but the very fact that she was talking to him made it impossible to perceive her ‘etual interlocutor. The next moment she was talking to no one, and, vain as her lisping was at that point, there came a moment when, brought forward by this endless wandering before a real- ity without reason, she stopped suddenly, emerging from the depths of her frivolity with a hideous expression. The isue was still che same. It was vain for her to search out her route at the ends of the earth and lose herself in infinite digressions—and the ‘voyage might last her entire life; she knew that she was coming closer every minute to the instant when it would be necessary not only to stop but to abolish her path, either having found ‘what she should not have found, or eternally unable to find it. ‘And it was impossible for her to give up her project. For how could she be silent, she whose language was several degrees be- low silence? By ceasing to be there, ceasing to live? These were just more ridiculous strategies, for through her death, closing off 2 the exits, she would only have precipitated the eternal race in the labyrinth, from which she retained the hope of escape as Jong 2s she had the perspective of time. And she no longer saw that she was coming imperceptibly closer to Thomas. She fol- 59lowed him, step by step, without realizing it, or ifshe realized it, then, wanting to leave him, to flee him, she had to make a greater effort. Her exhaustion became so overwhelming that she contented herself with mimicking her fight and stayed glued to him, her eyes flowing with tears, begging, imploring him to put an end to this situation, still rying, leaning over this mouth, to formulate words to continue her narrative at any cost, the same narrative she would have wished to devote her last measure of strength to interrupting and stifling. Te was in this state of abandonment that she allowed herself to be carried along by the feeling of duration. Gently, her fingers drew together, her steps left her and she slipped into a pure water where, from one instant to the next, crossing eternal cur- rents, she seemed to pass from life to death, and worse, from death to life, in a tormented dream which was already absorbed in a peaceful dream. Then suddenly with the noise of a tempest she entered into a solitude made of the suppression of all space, and, torn violently by the call of the hours, she unveiled herself le was as if she were in a green valley where, invited to be the personal rhythm, the impersonal cadence of all things, she was becoming with her age and her youth, the age, the old age, of others. First she climbed down into the depths of a day torally foreign to human days, and, fall of seriousness, entering into the intimacy of pure things, then rising up toward sovereign time, drowned among the stars and the spheres, far from know- ing the peace of the skies she began to tremble and to experience pain. Ic was during this night and this eternity that she prepared herself to become the time of men. Endlessly, she wandered along the empty corridors lit by the reflected light of a source which always hid itself and which she pursued without love, 60 with the obstinacy of an already lost soul incapable of seizing again the sense of these metamorphoses and the goal of this silent walk. But, when she passed before a door which looked like Thomas's, recognizing that the tragic debate was sill going on, she knew then that she was no longer arguing with him with ‘words and thoughts, but with the very time she was espousing. Now, each second, each sigh—and it was herself, nothing other than herself—dumbly attacked the unconcemed life he held up to her. And in each of his reasonings, more mysterious still than his existence, he experienced the mortal presence of the adver- sary, of this time without which, etemally immobilized, unable to come from the depths of the future, he would have been con- demned to sce the light of life die out on his desolate peak, like the prophetic eagle of dreams. So he reasoned with the absolute contradictor at the heart of his argument, he thought with the enemy and the subject ofall houghtin the depths of his thought, his perfect antagonist, this time, Anne, and mysteriously receiv- ing her within himself he found himself for the first time at grips with a serious conversation. It was in this situation that she pene- trated as a vague shape into the existence of Thomas. Everything, there appeared desolate and moumful. Deserted shores where deeper and deeper absences, abandoned by the eternally de- parted seaaftera magnificent shipwreck, gradually decomposed. She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petri- fied shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extra- ordinary sonority of nothingness which is made of the reverse of sound, and before her spread forth wondrous falls, dreamless sleep, the fading away which buries the dead in a life of dream, the death by which every man, even the weakest spirit, becomes 61spirit itself. In this exploration which she had undertaken so naively, believing that she might find the last word on herself, she recognized herself passionately in search of the absence of ‘Anne, of the most absolute nothingness of Anne. She thought she underscood—oh cruel illusion—that the indifference which flowed the length of Thomas like a lonely stream came from the infiltration, in regions she should never have penetrated, of the fatal absence which had succeeded in breaking all the dams, so that, wanting now to discover this naked absence, this pure neg- ative, the equivalent of pure light and deep desire, she had, in order to reach it, to yoke herself to severe trials. For lives on end. she had to polish her thought, to relieve it of all that which made of it a miserable bric-a-brac, the mirror which admires itself, che prism with its interior sun: she needed an I without its glassy solitude, without this eye so long stricken with strab- ism, this eye whose supreme beauty is to be as crosseyed as pos- sible, the eye of the eye, the thought of thought. One might have thought ofher as running into the sun and at every tum of the path tossing into an ever more voracious abyss an eternally poorer and more rarfied Anne. One would have confused her with this very abyss where, remaining awake in the midst of sleep, her spirit free of knowing, without light, bringing nothing to think in her meeting with thought, she prepared to go out so far in front of herself that on contact with the absolute naked ness, miraculously passing beyond, she could recognize therein her pure, her very own transparency. Gently, armed only with the name Anne which must serve her to return to the surface after the dive, she let the tide of the first and crudest absences rise—absence of sound silence, absence of being death—but after this so tepid and facile nothingness which Pascal, though already 62 terrified, inhabited, she was seized by the diamond absences, the absence of silence, the absence of death, where she could no longer find any foothold except in ineffable notions, indefin ablesomethings, sphinxesofunheard rumblings, vibrations which burst the ether of the most shattering sounds, and, exceeding their energy, explode the sounds themselves. And she fll among the major circles, analogous to those of Hell, passing, a ray of pre reason, by the critical moment when for a very shore in~ Fant one must remain in the absurd and, having left behind that which can still be represented, indefinitely add absence to ab- Sence and to the absence of absence and to the absence of the absence of absence and, thus, with this vacuum machine, desper- ately create the void. Ar this instant the real fall begins, the one which abolishes itself, nothingness incessantly devoured by 2 purer nothingness. But at this limit Anne became conscious of the madness of her undertaking. Everything she had thought she had suppressed of herself, she was certain she was finding it again, entire. At tis moment of supreme absorption, she recog- nized at the deepest point of her thought a thought, the miser~ able thought that she was Anne, the living, the blonde, and, oh horror, the intelligent. Images petrified her, gave birth to her, produced her. A body was bestowed on her, a body a thousand fimes more beautiful than her own, a thousand times more body; she was visible, she radiated from the most unchangeable matter: at the center of nullified thought she was the superior rock, the crumbly earth, without nitrogen, that from which it ‘would not even have been possible to create Adam; she was finally going to avenge herself by hurling herself against the incommunicable wich this grossest, ugliest body, this body of mud, with this vulgar idea that she wanted to vomit, that she 63‘was vomiting, bearing to the marvelous absence her portion of excrement. It was at that moment that at the heart of the un heard a shattering noise rang out and she began to howl “Anne, Anne” in a fiarious voice. At the heart of indifference, she burst into fame, a complete torch with all her passion, her hate for ‘Thomas, her love for Thomas. At the heart of nothingness, she intruded as a triumphal presence and hurled herself there, a corpse, an inassimilable nothingness, Anne, who still existed and existed no longer, a suprememockery to the thought of Thomas. 64, IXWan sue came AROUND, entirely speechless now, refusing any expression to het eyes as well as her lips, still swetched out on the ground, the silence showed her so united with silence that she embraced it furiously like another nature, whose intimacy ‘would have overwhelmed her with disgust. It seemed as if, dur- ing this night, she had asimilated something imaginary which ‘wesa burning thom to herand forced her to shove her own exis- tence outside like some foul excrement. Motionless against the wall, her body had mingled with the pure void, thighs and belly Tunited to a nothingness with neither sex nor sexual parts, hands convulsively squeezing an absence of hands, face drinking in ‘what was neither breath nor mouth, she had transformed her- Taf into another body whose life—supreme penury and indi- genice—had slowly made her become the toality ofthat which fhe could not become. There where her body was, her sleeping, head, there too was body without head, head without body, ody of wretchedness. Doubtless nothing had changed about her appearance, but the glance one might direct toward her which showed her to be like anyone else was utterly unimpor- tant, and, precisely because it was impossible to identify her, it ‘was in the perfect resemblance of her features, in the glaze of paturalness and sincerity laid down by the night, that the horror Of seeing her just as she had always been, without the least change, while it was certain that she was completely changed, found its source. Forbidden spectacle. While one might have been able to bear the sight of a monster, there was no cold- bloodedness that could hold out against the impression created by this fce on which, for hours, in an investigation which came tonnothing, the eye sought to distinguish a sign of strangeness or bizarreness. What one saw, with its familiar naruralness, be- o7came, by the simple fact that manifestly it was not what one should have seen, an enigma which finally not only blinded the eye but made it experience toward this image an actual nausea, an expulsion of detritus of al sorts which the glance forced upon itselfin trying to seize in this object something other than what it could see there. In fact, if what was entirely changed in an identical body—the sense of disgust imposed on all the senses forced to consider themselves insensitive—if the ungraspable character of the new person that had devoured the old and left het as she was, if this mystery buried in absence of mystery had not explained the silence which flowed from the sleeping girl, ‘one would have been tempted to search out in such calm some indication of the tragedy of illusions and lies in which the body of Anne had wrapped itself There was in fact something ter ribly suspicious about her mutism. That she should not speak, that in her motionlesmess she should retain the discretion of someone who remains silent even in the intimacy ofher dreams, all this was, finally, natural, and she was not about to betray herself, to expose herself, through this sleep piled upon sleep. But her silence did not even have the right to silence, and through this absolute state were expressed at once the complete unreality of Anne and the unquestionable and indemonstrable presence of this unreal Anne, from whom there emanated, by this silence, a sort of terrible humor which one became uneasily conscious of. As if there had been a crowd of intrigued and moved spectators, she tured to ridicule the possibility that one might see her, and a sense of ridicule came also from this wall against which she had stretched herself out in a way one might have taken (what stupidity) for sleep, and from this room where she was, wrapped in a linen coat, and where the day was begin- 68 ning to penetrate with the claughable ines ight by givin 01 1 aan ee re Srourd her a sad and insable curios, 4 dumb interrogation which, taking her as object, bore aso, vague ly, on everything, so that she existed as a problem capable of producing death, not, like the sphinx, by the dificulry of the Enigma, but by the temptation which she offered of resolving roblem in death. f often day had come, 2s she was waking up, one might have thought she had been drawn from sleep by the day. However, the end of the night did not explain the fact that she had opened her eyes, and her awakening was only a slow exhausting, the final mnovement toward rest: what made it impossible for her to sleep was the action ofa force which, far from being opposed to the night, might just as well have been called nocroral, She sow that she was alone, but though she could rise only in the wor of solitude, this isolation remained foreign to her, and, in the passive state where she remained, it was not important that her qolitude should burst in her like something she did not need to fecl and which drew her into the eternally removed domain of day, Not even the sadness was any longer felt as present. It wandered about her in a blind form. It came forward within the sphere of resignation, where it was impossible for it to sike or hit. Crossing over betrayed fatality, it came tight to the heart of the young woman and touched her with the feeling of letting go, with absence of consciousness into which she leapt with the greatest abandon, From this moment on, not 2 single desire Game to her to elucidate her situation in any way, and love was reduced to the impossibility of expressing and experiencing that ove. Thomas came in, But the presence of Thomas no longer 6had any importance in itself. On the contrary, it was terrible to see to what extent the desire to enjoy this presence, even in the most ordinary way, had faded, Not only was every motive for clear communication destroyed, but to Anne it seemed that the mystery of this being had passed into her own heart, the very place where it could no longer be seized except as an eternally badly formulated question. And he, on the contrary, in the silent indifference of his coming, gave an impression of offensive clar- ity, without the feeblest, the most reassuring sign of a secret. It ‘was in vain that she looked at him with the troubled looks of her fallen passion. It was as the least obscure man in the world that he came forth from the night, bathed in transparency by the privilege of being above any interrogation, a transfigured but trivial character from whom the problems were now separating themselves, just as she also saw herself cummed away from him by this dramatically empty spectacle, tured away upon herself where there was neither richness nor fallness but the oppressive ness of a dreary satiety, the certainty that there should evolve no other drama than the playing out of a day where despair and hope would be drowned, the uscless waiting having become, through the suppression ofall ends and of time itself, machine ‘whose mechanism had for its sole function the measurement, by a silent exploration, of the empty movement of its various parts. She went down into the garden and, there, seemed to dis- engage herself at least in part from the condition into which the events of the night had thrown her. The sight of the trees stun- ned her. Her eyes clouded over. What was striking now was the extreme weakness she showed. There was no resistance left in her organism, and with her transparent skin, the great pallor of her glances, she semed to tremble with exhaustion whenever 70 ¢ anything approached her. In fact one might have wondered ae eld stand the contact of the air and the ‘ies of the birds, By the way she oriented herselfin the garden, sone was almost sure that she was in another garden: not that she Syalked like a somnambulist in the midst of the images of her Humber, but she managed to proceed across the field fall of life, resounding and sunlit, co a worn-out field, mournful and ex- tinguished, which was a second version ofthe reality she eraveled through. Just when one saw her stop, out of breath and breath- ing with difficulty the excessively fresh, cool air which blew againse he, she was penetrating a raified atmosphere in which, to get back her breath, it was enough to stop breathing entirely. While she was walking with difficulty along the path where she had to lift up her body with each step, she was entering, a body ‘without knees, onto a path in every way like che first, but where the alone could go. This landscape relaxed her, and she fele the same consolation there as if, overturning from top to bottom the illusory body whose intimacy oppressed her, she might have been able to exhibit to the sun which threw light on her like a faint star, in the form of her visible chest, her folded legs, her dangling arms, the biter disgust which was piecing together an absolutely hidden second person deep within her. In this ravaged day, she could confess the revulsion and fright whose vastness ‘could be circumscribed by no image, and she succeeded almost joyously in forcing from her belly the inexpressible feelings {fantastic creatures having in tur the shape of her face, of her skeleton, of her entire body) which had drawn within her the entire world of repulsive and unbearable things, through the hhorror that world inspired in her. The solitude, for Anne, was immense, All that she saw, all that she felt was the tearing away nwhich separated her from what she saw and what she felt. The baneful clouds, if they covered the garden, nevertheless re- mained invisible in the huge cloud which enveloped them. The tree, a few steps away, was the tree with reference to which she was absent and distinc from everything. In all the souls which surrounded her like so many clearings, and which she could approach as intimately as her own soul, there was a silent, closed and desolate consciousness (the only light which made them perceptible), and it was solitude that created around her the sweet field of human contacts where, among infinite relation- ships fall of harmony and tendemess, she saw her own mortal pain coming to meet her. R“Wen THEY FOUND HR stretched out on a bench in the garden, they thought she had fainted. Bur she had not fainted; she was sleeping, having entered into sleep by way of a repose deeper yer than sleep. Henceforth, her advance toward unconsciousness ssa solemn combat in which she refused to give in to the thrill of drowsiness until she was wounded, dead already, and defended up to the las instant her right to consciousness and her Share of clear thoughts. There was no complicity between her and the night. From the time the day started to fade listening t0 the mysterious hyma which called her to another existence, she prepared herself forthe struggle in which she could be defeated bnly by the total ruin of life Her cheeks red, her eyes shining, tals and smiling, she enthusiastically mustered her strength. In Sain the dusk brought its guilry song to her ear; in vain was 2 plot woven against her in favor of darkness, No sweetness pene- vexed her soul along the path of torpor, no semblance of the holiness which is acquired through the proper acceptance of ill- ness. One fale that she would deliver into death nothing other than Anne, and that, fiercely intact, retaining everything that She was until the very end, she would not consent to save her- self by any imaginary death from death ivlf. The night went oon, and never had there been so sweet a night, so perfect to bend a sick person. The silence flowed, and the solitude fll of fiend- ship, che night fall of hope, pressed upon Anne's stretched-out body. She lay awake, without delirium. There was no narcotic in the shadows, none of those suspicious touchings which per- mit the darkness to hypnotize chose who resist sleep. The night dered nobly with Anne, and it was with the gies own weapons, purty, confidence and peace, that it agreed to meet her. It was aveet, infinitely sweet in such a moment of great weakness tO 15feel around oneself a world so stripped of artifice and perfidi- ‘ousness. How beautiful this night was, beautiful and not sweet, a classic night which fear did not render opaque, which put phan toms to flight and likewise wiped away the false beauty of the world, All that which Anne still loved, silence and solitude, were called night. All that which Anne hated, silence and solitude, were also called night. Absolute night where there were no longer any contradictory terms, where those who suffered were happy, where white found a common substance with black. And yet, night without confusion, without monsters, before which, without closing her eyes, she found het personal night, the one which her eyelids habitually created for her as they closed. Fully conscious, fll of clarity, she fele her night join the night. She discovered herself in this huge exterior night in the core of her being, no longer needing to pass before a bitter and tormented soul to arrive at peace. She was sick, but how good this sickness was, this sickness which was not her own and which was the health of the world! How pure it was, this sleep which wrapped around her and which was not her own and blended with the supreme consciousness ofall chings! And Anne slept. During the days which followed, she entered into a delicious field of peace, where to all eyes she appeared bathed in the in- toxication of recovery. Before this magnificent spectacle, she too felt within herself this joy of the universe, but it was an icy joy. And she waited for that which could be neither a night nor 1 day to begin. Something came to her which was the prelude not to a recovery but to a surprising state of strength. No one understood that she was going to pass through the state of per- fect health, through a marvelously balanced point of life, a pen- dulum swinging from one world to another. Through the 76 clouds which rushed over her head, she alone saw approaching with the speed of a shooting star the moment when, regaining contact with the earth, she would again grasp ordinary exis- tence, would see nothing, feel nothing, when she could live, live finally, and perhaps even die, marvelous episode! She saw her very faraway, this well Anne whom she did not know, through whom she was going to flow with a gay heart. Al Too dazzling instant! From the heart of the shadows a voice eel nes began. She no longer saw anyone but occa sional friends, and those who still came stopped asking for news. Everyone understood that the treatment was not winning out over the illness. But Anne recognized in this another sort of scom, and smiled at it. Whatever her fate might be, there was more life, more strength in her now than ever. Motionless for hours, sleeping with strength, speed, agi inher slep, she was like an athlete who has remained prone for a long time, and her rest was like the rest of men who excel in running and wrestling. She finally conceived a strange feeling of pride in her body; she took a wonderful pleasure in her being; a serious dream made her feel that she was still alive, completely alive, and chat she would have much more the feeling of being alive if she could Wipe away the complacencis and the fails hopes. Mysterious moments during which, lacking all courage and incapable of movement, she seemed to be doing nothing, while, accomplish ing an infinite task, she was incessantly climbing down to throw overboard the thoughts that belonged to her alive, the thoughts that belonged to her dead, to excavate within herself a refuge of extreme silence. Then the baneful stars appeared and she had to bury: she gave up her last pleasures, got rid of her last sufferings. 7‘What was uncertain was where she would come forth. She was already suffocating. My God, she is well; no, she is; sheis perfect from the point of view of being; she has, elevated to the highest degree, the joy of the greatest spirit discovering his most beauti- fal though. She is; no, she is well, she is slipping, the thunder of sensations fills pon her, she is smothered, she cries out, she hears herself, she lives. What joy! They give her something to drink, she cries, they console her. It is still night. Yet she could not help realizing it: around her, many things were changing, and a late climate surrounded her, as if gloomy spirits sought to draw her toward inhuman feelings. Slowly, by a pitiless proto- col, they took from her the tenderness and friendship of the world. If she asked for the flowers she loved, they gave her artificial roses with no scent which, though they were the only beings more mortal than herself, did not reserve her the pleasure of wilting, fading and dying before her eyes. Her room became uninhabitable: given a northern exposure for the first time, with a single window which admitted only the late afternoon sun, deprived each day of another lovely object, this room gave every evidence of being secretly emptied in order to inspire in her the desire to leave it as soon as possible. The world too was devastated. They had exiled the pleasant seasons, asked the chil- dren to cry out in joy elsewhere, called into the strect all the anger of cities, and it was an insurmountable wall of shattering sounds that separaced her from mankind. Sometimes she opened her eyes and looked around with surprise: not only were things changing, but the beings most attached to her were changing as well. How could there be any doubt? There was a tragic lessen- ing of tendemess for her. Henceforth her mother, planged for hours on end in her armchair without a word, her face ashen, 7B carefully deprived of everything which might have made her fovable no Tonger revealed anything of her affection but a feel- ing which made her ugly, at the very moment when Anne, 2s never before in her life, needed young and beautiful things. ‘What she had once loved in her mother, gaity, laughter and tears, all the expressions of childhood repeated in an adult, all had disappeared from this face which expressed only fatigue, and it was only far away from this place that she could imagine her again capable of crying, of laughing—laughing, what 2 wonder! no one ever here—a mother to everyone but her daughter. Anne raised her voice and asked her if she had been swimming. “Be quiet,” said her mother. “Don’t talk, you'll tire yourselé” Obviously, there were no confidences to be shared with a person about to die, no possible relationship between her and those who are enjoying themselves, those who are alive, She sighed. And yet her mother resembled her, and what is more every day added a new trait to this resemblance. Contrary to the rule, ie was the mother who cook her daughter's face as a model, made it old, showed what it would be like at sixty. This obese Anne, whose eyes had tumed gray as well as her hair, this was surely Anne if she were foolish enough to escape death. An innocent play: Anne was not duped. In spite of everything, life did not make itself hateful; she continued to love life. She was ready to die, but she was dying still loving flowers, even artificial howers, feeling herself horribly orphaned in her death, passionately regretting this ugly Anne, this im- potent Anne she would never become. Everything that was in- sidiously proposed to her so that she would not perceive that she was losing a great deal in leaving the world, this complicity of moralists and doctors, the traditional swindle perpetrated by 79the sun and by men, offering on the last day asa last spectacle the ugliest images and faces in dark corners, where it is obvious that those who die are content to die. .. all these deceptions failed. Anne intended to pass into death completely alive, evad- ing the intermediate states of disgust with life, refusal to live. Yer, surrounded by hardness, watched by her friends who tested her with an air of innocence, saying, “We can’t come tomor- tow, excuse us,” and who then, after she had answered in true friendship, “That's not important, don't take any trouble,” thought, “How insensitive she is becoming; she no longer cares about anything,” faced with this ad plot to reduce herto feelings which, before dying, must degrade her and make all regrets superfluous, the time arrived when she saw herself betrayed by her discretion, her shyness, just what she retained of her habitual manner. Soon they would be saying, “She's no longer herself, it would be better if she died,” and then: “What a deliverance for her if she died!” A gentle, irresistible pressure, how could one defend oneself against it? What did she have left that she could use to make it known that she had not changed? Just when she should have been throwing herself incessantly on her friends’ shoulders telling her doctor: “Save me, I don’t want to die”"—on that one condition they might still have considered her part of the world—she was greeting those who entered with a nod, giving them that which was most dear, a glance, a thought, pure impulses which just recently were still signs of true sympathy, but which now seemed the cold reserve of some- cone at odds with life at the very least. These scenes struck her and she understood that one does not ask restraint and delicacy ofa person who is suffering, feelings which belong co healthy civilizations, but rather crudeness and fienzy. Since it was the 80 ince it was the only way to prove that she had never had oe Tone fore ie serounded her, soe wat eed by the desire to cry out, ready to make a move to reinforce every bond, ready to see in those near to her beings who were ever nearer. Unfortunately, it was too late: she no longer had the face or the body of her feelings, and she could no longer be gay with gaity. Now, to all chose who came, whoever they ‘might be (chat was unimportant, time was shor’), she expressed by her closed eyes and her pinched lips the greatest passion ever enced. And, not having enough affection to tell everyone how much she loved them, she had recourse as well to the hard~ est and coldest impulses of her soul. It was true that everything in her was hardening. Until then, she still had suffering, She suffered to open her eyes, suffered to receive the gentlest words: it was her one manner of being moved, and never had there been more sensitivity than in this glance which won the simple plesure of scing a the cost of erul, tearing psn. But now, she hardly suffered any more at all; her body attained the idea of egoism which is the ideal of every body: it was hardest at the moment of becoming weakest, a body which no longer cried cout beneath the blows, borrowed nothing from the world, made itself, at the price of its beauty, the equivalent of a statue. ‘This hardness weighed terribly on Anne; she fele the absence of all feeling in her as an immense void, and anguish clutched her. ‘Then, in the form of this primordial passion, having now only 2 silent and dreary soul, a heart empry and dead, she offered her absence of friendship as the truest and purest friendship; she resigned herself, in this dark region where no one touched her, to responding to the ordinary affection of those around her by this supreme doube concerning her being, by the desperate con- atsciousness of being nothing any longer, by her anguish; she ‘made the sacrifice, fall of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become, And thus, deep within her, already sealed, al- ready dead, the most profound passion came to be. To those who cried over het, cold and oblivious she returned hundred~ fold what they had given her, devoting to them the anticipation of het death, her death, the pure feeling, never purer, of her existence in the tortured anticipation of her nonexistence. She drew from herselfnot the weak emotions, sadness, regret, which were the lot of those around her, meaningless accidents with no chance of making any change in them, but the sole passion cap- able of threatening her very being, that which cannot be alien- ated and which would continue to bum when all the lights were put out. For the first time, she raised the words “give oneself” to their true meaning: che gave Anne, she gave much more than the life of Anne, she gave the ultimate gift, the death of Anne; she separated herself from her terribly strong feeling of being Anne, from the terribly anguished feeling of being Anne threat- ened with dying, and changed it into the yet more anguished feeling of being no longer Anne, but her mother, her mother threatened by death, the entire world on the point of annihila~ tion. Never, within this body, this ideal of marble, monster of egoism, which had made of its unconsciousness the symbol of its estranged conscioumess in a last pledge of friendship, never had there been more tendemess, and never within this poor be- ing reduced to less than death, plundered of het most intimate treasure, her death, forced to die not personally but by the inter- mediary of all the others, had there been more being, more perfection of being. And so she had succeeded: her body was 82 truly the srongest, the happiest this existence, so impoverished Md restrained that it could not even receive its opposite, non aMjstence, was just what she was seeking. It was just chat reel her to be equal, up to the very end, to all the others, Irexcllent form to dmppear, fll of sength forthe ls strug” gle, During the moments which followed, 2 range foress fore up around Anne Ie did not resemble a cry. There were no house, no palace, no constructions of any sort was ater an immense ea, though the waters were invisible and the shore ha Feappeared. In this city, seated far from all hing, sd lat dream Tosttenong the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in she perspective ofa strange horizon, Anne ike some thing which could not be represented, no longer a human being bur simply a being, marvelously a being, among che may and the filling suns, with the agonizing aroms, doomed species, rounded ines, avended the course of waters where obscure drigins foundered. She alss had no means of knowing wl she asved, bu when the prolonged sho of ths norman i i er into a dreary and vi ; Fan ae ae oa rang» wail which wasLike the agic destruction of something nonlving, empry entities awoke ni fike monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other sbsences of shape and taming slene by tesible emi cences of lence, hey went out ina mysterious agony. Ther i wo way to express what they were, thes shapes, beings, banef tnies—for is, can something which s not the day appear in the midst of the day, something which in an sonospbere o Tight and clarity would represent the shudder of terror which tee source of the day? But, isidiously, they made themselves recognized on the threshold of che iremediable asthe obscure 83Jaws summoned to disappear with Anne. What was the result of this revelation? One would have said that everything was de- Sroyed, but that everything was beginning agzin as well. Time, seeing forth from its lake, rolled her in an immense pat, and, though she could notentzey leavespace where she sil breathed, ‘Htew her toward bottomless valleys where the world seemed to fave retumed to the moment ofits creation, Anne's life-—and this very word sounded like a defiant challenge in this place ‘phere there was no life—participated in the first ray thrown in MHlof etemiy through the midst of indolent notions. Life-giving forces bathed her as if they had suddenly found in her breast, ree rated to death, the vainly sought meaning of the word “fie giving”. Caprice, which buile up the infinite framework of sts covsbinations to conjure up the void, sized her and ifshe did ie Tose all existence at that moment, her discomfore was all the ‘worse, her transformation greater than if, in her tranquil human Wave he had actually abandoned life, for there was no absurdity ‘pe cyar allowed to escape, and in the interval ofa time simulated by the fasion of remy and the idea of nothingness, she bese OY the monsters in which creation tried itself in vain. Suddenly auind never was anything, so abrupt—the failures of chance snore an end, and that which could in no way be expected ceocived ies success from a mysterious hand. Incredible moment, Jn which she reappeared in her own form, but accursed instant in Wall, for this unigue combination, perceived in a fash, die 2s etn a ash and the unshakeable laws which no shipwreck Tear eon able to submerge were broken, giving in toa limitlest caprce, An event so serious that no one near her perceived i see Sichough the asmosphere was heavy and weirdly eras Faanad, noone fle the strangeness. The doctor bent over her 84. and thought that she was dying according to the laws of death, not perceiving that she had already reached that instant when, in her, the laws were dying. She made an imperceptible mo- tion; no one understood that she was floundering in the instant when death, destroying everything, might also destroy the pos- sibility of annihilation. Alone, she saw the moment of the mira- cle coming, and she received no help. Oh, stupidity of those who are torn by grief! Beside her, a she was much less than dying, as she was dead, no one thought to maltiply their absurd gestures, to liberate themselves from all convention and place themselves in the condition of primal creation. No one sought out the false beings, the hypocrites, the equivocal beings, all those who jeer at the idea of reason. No one said in the silence: “Let us hurry and before she is cold let us thrust her into the unknown. Let us create a darkness about her so that the law may abandon itself disloyally to the impossible. And ourselves, let us go away, lose all hope: hope itself must be forgotten.” ‘Now Anne opened her eyes. There was in fact no more hope. ‘This moment of supreme distraction, this trap into which those who have nearly vanquished death fall, ultimate return of Eu rydice, in looking one last time toward the visible, Anne had just fallen into ie as well. She opened her eyes without the least ‘curiosity, with the lassitude of someone who knows perfectly well in advance what will be offered to her sight, Yes, there is her room, there isher mother, her friend Louise, there is Thomas. My God, hat was just what it was. All those she loved were there. Her death must absolutely have the character of a solemn farewell, each one must receive his squeeze of the hand, his smile, And it is true that she squeezed their hands, smiled ar them, loved them, She breathed gently. She had her face turned 8stoward them as if she wished to see them up to the very lst moment. Everything that had to be done, she did it. Like every dying person, she went away observing the rituals, pardoning her enemies, loving her friends, without admitting the secret which no one admits: that all this was already insignificant. Al- ready she had no more importance. She looked at them with an ever more modest look, a simple look, which for them, for humans, was an empty look. She squeezed their hands ever more gently, with a grip which did not leave a trace, a grip which they could not feel. She did not speak. These last moments must be without any memory. Her face, her shoulders must become invisible, as is proper for something which is fading away. Her mother whined: “Anne, do you recognize me? An- swer me, squeeze my hand.” Anne heard this voice: what good was it, her mother was no longer anything more than an insig- nificant being. She also heard Thomas; in fact, she knew now what she had to say to Thomas, she knew exactly the words she had scarched for all her life in order to reach him. But she re- mained silent; she thought: what good is it—and this word was also the word she was secking—Thomas is insignificant. Let us sleep. 86 XI‘Wan ANNE HAD Diep, Thomas did not leave the room, and he seemed deeply afficted. This grief caused great discomfort to all chose present, and they had the premonition that what he was saying to himself at that moment was the prelude to 2 drama the thought of which filled them with consternation. They went away sadly, and he remained alone. One might think that what he was saying to himself could in no way allow itself to be read, but he took care to speak as if his words had a chance of being heard and he left aside the strange eruth to which he seemed chained. “ suspected,” he said, “that Anne had premeditated her death. This evening she was peaceful and noble. Without the coquet- tishness which hides from the dead their true state, without that last cowardice which makes them wait to die by the doctor's hand, she bestowed death upon herself, entirely, in an instant. I approached this perfect corpse. The eyes had closed. The mouth did not smile. There was not a single reflection of life in the face. A body without consolation, she did not hear the voice which asked, ‘Is it possible?” and no one dreamed of saying of her what is said of the dead who lack courage, what Christ said of the girl who was not worthy of burial, to humiliate her: she is sleep- ing. She was not sleeping. She was not changed, either. She had stopped at the point where she resembled only herself, and where her face, having only Anne's expression, was disturbing t0 look at, I took her hand. I placed my lips on her forehead. I treated her as if she were alive and, because she was unique among the dead in still having a face and a hand, my gestures did not seem insane. Did she appear alive, then? Alas, all that prevented her from being distinguished from a real person was that which verified her annihilation. She was entirely within 89herself: in death, abounding in life. She seemed more weighty, more in control of herself No Anne was lacking in the corpse of Anne. All the Annes had been necessary to bring her back to nothing. The jealous, the pensive, the violent, had served only ‘once, to make her completely dead. At her end, she seemed to need more being to be annihilated than to be, and, dead pre- cisely from this excess which permitted her to show herself en- tirely, she bestowed on death all the reality and all the existence which constituted the proof of her own nothingness, Neither impalpable nor dissolved in the shadows, she imposed herself ever more strongly on the senses. As her death became more real, she grew, she became larger, she hollowed out a deep tomb in her couch. Obliterated as she was, she drew every glance to her, We who remained beside her, we felt ourselves: compressed by this huge being, We were suffocating for lack of air. Each of us discovered with anguish what only casket-bearers know, that the dead double in weight, chat they are the largest, the most powerfal of all beings. Each bore his portion of this manifest dead person. Her mother, seeing her so like a living person, naively lifted up che girl's head and was unable to bear the enormous weight, proof of the destruction of her daughter. And then, I stayed alone with her. She had surely died for that mo- ‘ment when people might think she had defeated me. For dying had been her ruse to deliver a body into nothingness. At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something. The act of not seeing had now its integral eye. The silence, the real silence, the one which is not composed of silenced words, of possible thoughts, had a voice. 90 sutifal from one instant to the next, was con ie foe ran ea Thexe was nota single pare of her x which wil ay ogee od story and the story of her dea gether and me left in the world to name Anne, that she 2 Sey de moment of ioral in notingnes, in which svhat has ceased co be enters into a thoughes dream. It was truly night. I was surrounded by stars. The totality of things wrapped about me and I prepared snyefford the agony wi che ited consciousness that I was unable to die. But, . a ‘what she alone had perceived up until hen appeared mani fer to everyone: I reveiled to them, in me, the strangeness of their condion and the shame of an endles existence, Of coure T eould die, bue death shone forth perfidiuly for me as the death of death, so that, becoming the etemal man taking place of the moribund, this man without crime, without Spy feason for dying who is every man who dic, l would dic, dead petson so alien t death that I would spend my supreme momens inane when vas ey pura whch eld no live all the hours of my life in the hour in wh f ive them. Who more than I was deprived of the last oe at sthope torally deprived of the last consolation which memory offers to those who despair, co those who have forgotten happiness and cost themselves ffom the pinnacle of lifein order to recall its joys? And yet was realy 2 dead perio, Twas even the only posible dead person I was the only man who didnot give the impression cha he died by chance. Ally srength, the sens I had, in taking the hemlock, of being not Socrates dying but Socrates increasing himself dough Fist this certainey of being unable to disappear which belongs only onbeings afficted with a terminal illness, this serenity before the scaffold which bestows upon the condemned their true pardon, ‘made of every instane of my life the instant in which I was going to leave life. All my being seemed to mingle with death. As naturally as men believe they are alive, accepting as an inevitable impulse their breathing, the circulation of their blood, so I ceased living. I drew my death from my very existence, and not from the absence of existence. I presented a dead person who did not confine himself o the appearance of a diminished being, and this dead person, filled with passions but insensitive, calling for his thought upon an absence of thought and yee carefully sepa rating out whatever there might be in it of void, of negation in life, in order not to make of his death a metaphor, an even weaker image of normal death, brought to its highest point the paradox and the impossibility of death. What then distinguished me from the living? Just this, chat neither night, nor loss of consciousness, nor indifference called me from life. And what distinguished me from the dead, unless it was a personal act in which at every instant, going beyond appearances which are generally sufficient, I had to find the sense and the definitive explanation of my death? People did not want to believe it, but my death was the same thing as death, Before men who know only how to die, who live up until the end, living people touched by the end of their lives as if by a slight accident, I had only death as an anthropometric index. This is in fact what made my destiny inexplicable. Under the name Thomas, in this chosen state in which I might be named and described, I had the ap- pearance of any living person, but since I was real only under the name of death, I let the baneful spirit of the shadows show through, blood mixed with my blood, and the mirror of each of 92 iy days reflected the confused images of death and life. And so my fate scupefied the crowd. This Thomas forced me to appear, while [ was living, not even the eternal dead person Twas and on Which no one could fix their glance, but an ordinary dead per- son, a body without life, an insensitive sensitivity, thought with- fut thought. At the highest point of contradiction, I was this legitimate dead person. Represented in my feelings by a double for whom each feeling was as absurd as for a dead person, at the pinnacle of passion Tattained the pinnacle of estrangement, and T seemed to have been removed from the human condition be~ cause Thad truly accomplished it. Since, in each human act, I ‘was the dead person that at once renders it possible and impos- ‘ible and, if walked, if chought, I was the one whose complete absence alone makes the step or the thought possible, before the beasts, beings who do not bear within them their dead double, I Jostmy lastreason for existing. There wasatragicdistance becween tus, A man without a trace of animal nature, I ceased to be able to express myself with my voice which no longer sang, no longer even spoke as the voice of a talking bird speaks. I thought, out- Side of all image and all thought, in an act which consisted of being unthinkable. Every moment, I was this purely human rman, supreme individual and unique example, with whom, in dying, each person makes an exchange, and who dies alone in place of all. With me, the species died each time, completely. ‘Whereas, if these composite beings called men had been left to die on their own, they would have been seen to survive miser- ably in pieces divided up among different things, reconstituted ina mixture of insect, tree and earth, I disappeared without a trace and fulfilled my role as the one, the unique dead person to perfection. I was thus the sole corpse of humanity. In contra~ 93diction of those who say that humanity does not die, I proved in every way that only humanity is capable of dying. I appeared in every one of these poor moribunds, ugly as they were, at the instant full of beauty in which, renouncing all their links with the other species, they become, by renouncing not only the world, but the jackal, the ivy, they become uniquely men. These scenesstill glow within me like magnificent festivals, [approached them and their anxiety grew. These miserable creatures who were becoming men felt the same terror at feeling themselves men as Isaac on the altar at becoming a lamb. None of them recognized my presence and yee there was in the depths of them, like a fatal ideal, a void which exerted a temptation over them, which they felt as a person of such complete and imposing reality that chey had to prefer that person to any other, even at the cost of their existence. Then the gates of agony opened and they flung themselves into their error. They shrunk, forced themselves to be reduced to nothing to correspond to this model of nothingness which they took for the model of life. They loved only life and they struggled against it. They perished from a taste for life so strong that life seemed to them that death whose approach they anticipated, which they thought they were flee- ing as they hurled themselves forward to meet it and which they recognized only at the very last moment when, as the voice ‘was saying to them, ‘It is t00 late,” I was already taking theic place. What happened then? When the guard who had stepped away returned, he saw someone who resembled no one, a face- less stranger, the very opposite ofa being. And the most loving friend, the best son saw their senses altered before this alien shape and cast a look of horror on that which they loved the most, a cold, unrecognizable look as if death had taken not their 94 friend but their feelings, and now they were the ones, they, the living, who were changing so profoundly that it might have been called a death. Even their relations among themselves were altered. If they touched one another it was with a shudder, feel- ing that they were experiencing contact with a stranger. Each, with reference to the other, in complete solitude, complete in- timacy, each became for the other the only dead person, the only survivor. And when he who wept and he who was wept over came to blend together, became one, then there came an outburst of despair, this strangest moment of the mourning, when, in the mortuary chamber, fiends and relations add to themselves the one who has lefe thei number, feel themselves of the same substance, as respectable as he, and even consider them- selves the authentic dead person, the only one worthy to impose upon their common grief. And everything, then, seems simple to them. They again bestow on the dead person his familiar nature, after having brushed past him as if he were a scandalous reality. They say: ‘I never understood my poor husband (my poor father) better.’ They imagine they understand him, not only such as he was when living, but dead, having che same knowledge of him that a vigorous tree has ofa cut branch, by the sap which still flows. Then, gradually, the living assimilate those who have disappeared completely. Pondering the dead in pondering oneself becomes the formula of appeasement. They are seen entering triumphally into existence. The cemeteries are emptied. The sepulchral absence again becomes invisible. The strange contradictions vanish. And it is in a harmonious world that everyone goes on living, immortal to the end. “The certainty of dying, the certainty of not dying, there is all that is lef for the crowd, of the reality of death. But those who 95contemplated me fele that death could also associate with exis tence and form this decisive word: death exists. They have developed the habit of saying about existence everything they could say of death for me and, rather chan murmur, ‘Tam, Tam nor,’ mix the terms together in a single happy combination and say, ‘Iam, while [am not,’ and likewise, ‘Iam not, while lam,” without there being the slightest attempt to force contradictory words together, rubbing them one against the other like stones. AAs voices were called down upon my existence, affirming in succession, with equal passion: ‘Hie exists for always, he does not cexist for always,’ that existence took on a fatal character in their eyes. It seemed that I was walking comfortably over the abysses and that, complete in myself, not hal&phantom half-man, 1 penetrated my perfect nothingness. A sort of integral ventrilo- quist, wherever I cried out, that is where I was not, and also just where I was, being in every way the equivalent of silence. My word, as if composed of excessively high vibrations, first de- vouted silence, then the word. I spoke, I was by that act imme- diately placed in the center of the intrigue. I threw myself into the pure fire which consumed me at the same time it made me visible. I became transparent before my own sight. Look at men: the pure void summons their eye to call itself blind and a per- petual alibi exchanged between the night outside and the night within permits them to retain the illusion of day throughout their lives. For me, it was this very illusion which by an inex- plicable act seemed to have issued from myself. I found myself with two faces, glued one to the other. I was in constant contact with ewo shores. With one hand showing that I was indeed there, with the other—what am I saying?—without the other, with this body which, imposed on my real body, depended 96 entirely on a negation of the body, I entered into absolute dispute with myself. Having two eyes, one of which was pot case] of extreme visual acuity, it was with the other which ‘was an eye only because of its refusal to see that I saw every” thing visible. And so on, for all my organs I bad a part of myself submerged, and it was to this pat ost ina constant ship wreck, chat lowed my direction, my face, my necessity. I found ny proof inthis movement roward the nonexistent in which the proof that I existed, rather than becoming degraded, was reinforced to the point of becoming manifestly true. I made a Supreme effort co keep outside myself, as near ax possible co the pice of beginnings. Now, far from achieving as = complete vagn, as an adolescent, as protoplasm, the state of the possible, I made my way toward something complete, and T caught glimpte in these depts of the strange face of him who I reilly oeasend who had nothing in common with an already dead man or with 2 man yet to be born: a marvelous companion wit Sthom [wished with all my might to blend myself, yt separate from me, with no path that might lead me to him. How could T reach him? By killing myself absurd plan. Berween this corpse, the same asa living person but without life, and this unnameable, the same as a dead person but without death, T could not see = single line of relationship. No poison might unite me with that Svkich could bear no name, could not be designated by the op- posite of its opposite, nor conceived in relationship to anything. Prmath was a erade metamorphosis beside the indiscernible nul- Ty which I nevertheless coupled with the name Thomas. Wasit than a fantasy, this enigma, the creation of a word maliciously formed to destroy all words? But if I advanced within myself, hurrying laboriously toward my precise noon, I yet experienced 97as a tragic certainty, at the center of the living Thomas, the in- accessible proximity of that Thomas which was nothingness, and the more the shadow of my thought shrunk, the more I con- ceived of myself in this faultless clarity as the possible, the will- ing host of this obscure Thomas. In the plenticude of my reality, I believed I was reaching the unreal. O my consciousness, it was not a question of imputing to you—in the form of revery, of fainting away, of hiatus—that which, having been unable to be assimilated to death, should have passed for something worse, your own death. What am I saying? I felt this nothingness bound to your extreme existence as an unexceptionable condi- tion. I fele that between it and you undeniable ratios were being established. All che logical couplings were incapable of express- ing this union in which, without then or because, you came to- gether, both cause and effect at once, unreconcilable and indis- soluble, Was it your opposite? No, I said not. But it seemed that if, slightly falsifying the relationships of words, I had sought the opposite of your opposite, having lost my true path I would have arrived, without tuming back, proceeding wondrously from you-consciousness (at once existence and life) to you-un- consciousness (at once reality and death), I would have arrived, setting out into the terrible unknown, at an image of my enigma which would have been at once nothingness and existence. And with these two words I would have been able to destroy, in- cessantly, that which was signified by the one by that which was signified by the other, and by that which the two signified, and at the same time I would have destroyed by their oppositeness that which constituted the oppositeness of these two opposites, and I would have finished, kneading them endlessly to melt that which was untouchable, by reemerging right beside myself, 98 Harpagon suddenly catching his thief and grabbing hold of his ‘own arm. It was then that, deep within a cave, the madness of the tacitum thinker appeared before me and unintelligible words rung in my ears while I wrote on the wall these sweet words: ‘I ink, therefore Iam not.’ These words brought me a delicious ion. In the midst of an immense countryside, a flaming lens reccived the dispersed rays of the sun and, by those fires, became conscious of itself as 2 monstrous I, not at the points at which it received them, but at the point at which it projected and united them in a single beam. At this focus-point, the center of a ter- rible heat, it was wondrously active, it illuminated, it burned, it devoured; the entire universe became a flame at the point at which the lens touched it; and the lens did not leave it until it was destroyed. Nevertheless, I perceived that this mirror was like a living animal consumed by its own fire. The earth it set ablaze was its entire body reduced to dust, and, from this un- ceasing flame, it drew, in a torrent of sulphur and gold, the con- sequence that it was constantly annihilated. Ic began to speak and its voice seemed to come from the bottom of my heart. I think, it said, I bing together all chat which is light without heat, rays without brilliance, unrefined products; I brew them together and conjugate them, and, in a primary absence of myself, I dis- cover myself as a perfect unity at the point of greatest intensity. I think, it said, Iam subject and object of an all-powerfal radia- tion; a sun using all its energy to make itself night, as well as to make itself sun. I think: there at che point where thought joins ‘with me am able to subtract myself from being, without dimin- ishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me for myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure 99me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in ‘order to make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said ‘Thomas, and this invisible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My exis- tence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act 1 performed, produced the same act and did not perform it. T walked, counting my steps, and my life was that of a man cast in concrete, with no legs, with not even the idea of movement. Beneath the sun, the one man the sun did not illuminate went forward, and this light which hid from itself, this torrid heat which was not heat, nevertheless issued from a real sun. I looked before me: girl was sitting on a bench, I approached, I sat down Deside her. There was only a slight distance between us. Even. when she tured her head away, she perceived me entirely. She saw me with my eyes which she exchanged for her own, with ry face which was practically her face, with my head which sat easily on her shoulders. She was already joining herself to me. In a single glance, she melted in me and in this intimacy dis- covered my absence. I felt she was oppressed, trembling. I im~ agined her hand ready to approach me, to touch me, but the only hand she would have wanted to take was ungraspable. 1 ‘understood that she was passionately searching out the cause of her discomfort, and when she saw that there was nothing ab- normal about me she was seized with terror. I was like her. My strangeness had as its cause all that which made me not seem strange to her. With horror she discovered in everything that was ordinary about her the source of everything that was extra~ ordinary about me. I was her tragic double. If she got up, she 100 knew, watching me get up, that it was an impossible movement, bu she also knew that it was a very simple movement for her, and her fright reached a peak of intensity because there was no difference between ws. I lifted my hand to my forehead, it was warm, I smoothed my hair. She looked at me with great pity. She had pity for this man with no head, with no arms, com- pletely absent from the summer and wiping away his perspira- tion at the cost of unimaginable effort. Then she looked at me again and vertigo seized her. For what was there that was insane in my action? It was something absurd which nothing explained, nothing designated, the absurdity of which destroyed itself, ab- surdity of being absurd, and in every way like something rea- sonable. I offered this girl the experience of something absurd, and it was a terrible test. I was absurd, not because of the goat's foot which permitted me to walk with a human pace, but be- cause of my regular anatomy, my complete musculature which permitted me a normal pace, nevertheless an absurd pace, and, normal as it was, more and more absurd. Then, in turn, [looked at her: I brought her the one true mystery, which consisted of the absence of mystery, and which she could therefore do noth~ ing but search for, eternally. Everything was clear in me, every- thing was simple: there was no other side to the pure enigma. I showed her a face with no secret, indecipherable; she read in my heart as she had never read in any other heart; she knew why I had been born, why I was there, and the more she reduced the clement of the unknown in me, the more het discomfort and her fright increased. She was forced to divulge me, she separated me from my last shadows, in the fear of seeing me with no shadow. She pursued this mystery desperately; she destroyed me insatiably. Where was I for her? I had disappeared and I felt 101her gathering herself up to throw herself into my absence as if into her mirror. There henceforth was her reflection, her exact shape, there was her personal abyss. She saw herself and desired herself, she obliterated herself and rejected herself, she had in- effable doubts about herself, she gave in to the temptation of meeting herself there where she was not. I saw her giving in. I put my hand on her knees. “Lam sad; the evening is coming. But I also experience the opposite of sadness, I am at that point where it is suficent to experience a little melancholy to feel hate and joy. I feel that I am tender, not only toward men but toward their passions. I love them, loving the feelings by which one might have loved them. I bring them devotion and life at the second degree: to separate us there is nothing more than that which would have united us, friendship, love. In the depths of myself, at the end of the day, strange emotions are deposited which take me for thei object. I love myself with the spirit of revulsion, I calm myself with fear, I taste life in the feeling which separates me from it. All these passions, forced within me, produce nothing other than that which Iam and the entire universe exhausts its rage to make me feel something, vaguely, of myself, feel some being which does not feel itself Now calm comes down with the night. Ican no longer name a single feeling. If were to call my present state impassivity, I could just as well cal it fice. What I feel is the source of that which is felt, the origin believed to be without feeling, the indiscernible impulse of enjoyment and revulsion. And, it is true, I feel nothing. I am reaching regions where that which one experiences has no relation with that which is experienced, I go down into the hard block of marble with the sensation of slipping into the sea. I drown myself in 102 mute bronze. Everywhere hardness, diamond, pitiless fire, and yet the sensation is that of foam. Absolute absence of desire. No movement, no phantom of movement, neither anything im- mobile, Itis in such great poverty, such absence, that I recognize all the passions from which I have been withdrawn by an in- significant miracle. Absent from Anne, absent from my love for Anne to the extent that I loved Anne. And absent, doubly, from myself, carried cach time by desire beyond desire and destroying even this nonexistent Thomas where I felt I truly texisted, Absent from this absence, I back away infinitely. I lose all contact with the horizon Iam fleeing. I flee my flight. Where isthe end? Already the void seems to me the ultimate in fullness: understood it, I experienced it, I exhausted it. Now I am like a beast terrified by its own leap. Tam falling in horror of my fall. 1 aspire vertiginously to reject myself from myself, Is it night? Have I come back, another, to the place where I was? Again there is a supreme moment of calm, Silence, refuge of transpar- ency for the soul. I am terrified by this peace. I experience sweemess which contains me for a moment and consumes me. IfThad a body, I would grip my throat with my hands. I would like to suffer. I would like to prepare a simple death for myself, in an agony in which I would tear myself to pieces. What peace! Lam ravaged by delights. There is no longer anything of me which does not open itself to this future void as if to a frightful enjoyment. Nonotion, noimage, no feeling sustains me, Whereas just a moment ago I felt nothing, simply experiencing each feeling as a great absence, now in the complete absence of feel- ings I experience the strongest feeling. I draw my fright from the fright which I do not have. Fright, terror, the metamor- phosis passes all choughe. I am at grips with a feeling which re- 103veals to me that I cannot experience it, and it is at that moment that I experience it with a force which makes it an inexpressible torment, And that is nothing, for I could experience it as some- thing other than what it is, fright experienced as enjoyment. But the horror is chat there emerges within it the consciousness that no feeling is possible, and likewise no thought and no consciousness. And the worst horror is that in apprehending it, far from dissipating it like a phantom by touching it, I cause it to increase beyond measure. I experience it as not experiencing itand as experiencing nothing, being nothing, and this absurdity is its monstrous substance. Something totally absurd serves as my reason. I feel myself dead—no; I feel myself, living, infin~ itely more dead than dead. I discover my being in the vertiginous abyss where it is not, an absence, an absence where it sets itself like a god, Iam not and I endure. An inexorable fature stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feel- ing which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness. A feeling which has to be given a name and which I call anguish. Here is the night. The darkness hides nothing. My first perception is that this night is not a provisional absence of light. Far from being a possible locus of images, itis composed of all that which is not seen and is not heard, and, listening to it, even a man would know that, if he were not a man, he would hear nothing. In crue night, then, the unheard, the invisible are lacking, all those things that make the night habitable. It does not allow anything other than itself to be attributed to it; itis impenetrable. I am truly in the beyond, if 104, the beyond is that which admits of no beyond. Along with the feeling that everything has vanished, this night brings me the feeling that everything is near me. It is the supreme relationship whieh is sufficient unto itself; it leads me eternally to itself, and dn obscure race from the identical to the identical imparts to me the desire of a wonderfal progres. In this absolute repetition of the same is born true movement which cannot lead to rest. 1 feel myself directed by the night toward the night, A sort of being, composed ofall that which is excluded from being, pre- sents itself as the goal of my undertaking. That which isnot seen, js not understood, is not, creates right beside me the level of ‘nother nighe, and yet the same, toward which I aspire unspeak- ably, though T am already mingled with it. Within my reach there is a world—I call it world, as, dead, I would call the earth nothingness. I call it world because thete is no other posible world for me. Just as when one moves toward an object, T believe I am making it come closer, but itis the one that under- stands me. Invisible and outside of being, it perceives me and sustains me in being, Itself, I perceive it, an unjustifiable chimera £1 were not there, I perceive it, not in the vision T have of it, pur in the vision and the knowledge it has of me, I am seen. Beneath this glance, 1 commit myself to passivity which, rather than diminishing me, makes me real. I seck neither to distinguish it, nor to attain it, nor to suppose it. Perfectly negli- gene, by my distraction I retain for it the quality of inaccesi- bility which is appropriate to it. My senses, my imagination, ry spirit, all are dead on the side on which ie looks at me. T teive it as the sole necessity, that which is not even a hypothesis was my sole resistance, who am annihilating myself. I am Sgen. Porous, identical to the night, which is not seen, Tam seen. 105