Digital Manuscript ProjectMalone meurt / Malone Dies

[1375] ways done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I
am, nor if I am.
[1376] Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a
little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image,
no matter what I say.
[1377] And seeing what a poor thing I have made, or
how like myself, I shall eat it.
[1378] Then be alone a long time, un-
happy, not knowing what my prayer should be, nor to whom.
[1379] I have taken a long time to find him again, but I have found
him again[₰].
[1380] How did I know it was he? he, [1381] I don't know.
[1382] And what can have changed him
so?
[1383] Life perhaps, the struggle to love, to eat, to escape the
redressreers of wrongs.
[1384] I slip into him, I suppose in the hope of
learning something.
[1385] But it is a stratum, strata, without debris or
vestiges.
[1386] But before I am done I shall find traces of what was.
[1387] I ran him down in the heart of the town, sitting on a bench.
[1389] How
did I know it was he?
[1390] The eyes perhaps.
[1391] No, I don't know how I knew,
I'll take back nothing.
[1392] Perhaps it is not he.
[1393] No mattern, [1394] he is mine
now, [1395] living flesh and needless to say male, living with that even-
ing life which is like a convalescence, if my memories are mine,
and which you savour doddering about in the wake of the fitful sun,
or deeper than the dead, in the corridors of the underground rail-
way [1396] and the press stink [⁁] stench of their harassed mobs scurrying from cradle to
grave to get to the right place at the right time.
[1397] What more do I
want?
[1398] Yes, those were the days, quick to night and well beguiled
with the search for warmth and reasonably edible scraps.
[1399] And you
imagine it will be so till the end.
[1400] But suddenly all begins to
rage and roar again, you are lost in forests of high threshing
ferns or whirled far out on the face of wind-swept wastes, till
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Malone meurt / Malone Dies © 2017 Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.
Editors: Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst and Vincent Neyt