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[1286] day, with all my feeble strength, and how often day to break, all the livelong night.
[1287] But before leaving this subject and entering upon another, I feel it incumbent on me to say that it is never light in this place, never really light.
[1288] The light is there, outside, the air sparkles, the granite wall across the way glitters with all its mica, the light is against my window, but it does not come through. So that here all bathes, I will not say in shadow, nor even in half-shadow, but in a kind of leaden light that makes no shadow, so that it is hard to say from what direction it comes, for it seems to come from all directions at once, and with equal force.
[1289] I am convinced for example that at the present moment it is as bright under my bed as it is under the ceiling, which admittedly is not saying much, but I need say no more.
[1290] And does not that amount to simply saying simply [₰] this, that there is really no colour in this place, except in so far as this kind of greay[₰] incandescence may be called a colour?
[1291] Yes, no doubt one may speak of grey, personally I have no objection, in which case[⁁] the conflict here would lie between this grey and the black that it overlays more or less, I was going to say according to the time of day, but no, it does not always seem to be a question of the time of day.
[1292] I myself am very grey, I even sometimes have the feeling that I emit grey, in the same way as my sheets for example.
[1293] And my night is not the sky's.
[1294] Naturally black is black the whole world over.
[1295] But how is it my little space is not visited by the luminaries I sometimes see shining afar and how is it the moon where Cain toils bowed beneath his burden never sheds its light on my face?
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[1296] In a word there seems to be the light and dark of the outer world, of those who know the sun and moon emerge at such an hour and at such another plunge again below the surface, and who rely on this, and who know that clouds are always to be expected but sooner or later always pass away, and mine.
[1297] But mine too has its alternations, I will not deny it, its twilights and its dawns, but that is what I say, for I too must have lived, once, out there, and there is no recovering from that.
[1298] And when I examine the ceiling and walls I see there is no possibility of my making light, atrtificial light, like the couple across the way for example.
[1299] But someone would have to give me a lamp, or a torch, you know, and I don't know if the air here is of the kind that lends itself to the comedy of combustion.
[1300] Mem, look for a match in your possessions, and see if it burns.
[1301] The noises too, cries, steps, doors, murmurs, cease for whole days, their days.
[1302] Then that silence of which, knowing what I know, I shall merely say that there is nothing, how shall I say, nothing negative about it.
[1303] And softly my little space begins to throb again.
[1304] You may say it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head and that these eight, no, six, these six planes that enclose me are of solid bone. But thence to conclude the head is mine, no, never.
[1305] A kind of air circulates, I must have said so, and when all goes still I hear it beating against the walls and being beaten back by them.
[1306] And then somewhere in midspace other waves, other onslaughts, gather and break, whence I suppose the faint sound of aerial surf that is my silence.
[1307] Or else it is the sudden storm, analagous 
to those outside, rising and drowning the cries of the children, the dying,
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[1307] the lovers, so that in my innocence I say they cease, whereas in reality they never cease.
[1308] It is difficult to decide.
[1309] And in the skull is it a vacuum.?
[1310] I ask.
[1311] And if I close my eyes, close them really, as others cannot, but as I can, for there are limits to my impotence, then sometimes my bexd is caught up into the air and tossed like a straw by the whirling eddies, and I in it.
[1312] Fortunately it is not so much an affair of eyelids, but as it were the soul that must be veiled, that soul denied in vain, vigilant, anxious, turning in its cage as in a lantern, in the night without haven or craft or matter or understanding.
[1313] Ah yes, I have my little pastoimes and they should
[1314] What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I have only just succeeded in recovering it after fourty-eight hours ( see above) of intermittent efforts. [1315] What my stick lacks is a little prehensile proboscis like the nocturnal tapir's. [1316] I should really lose my pencil more often, it might do me good, I might be more cheerful, it might be more cheerful. [1317] I have spent two unforgettable days of which nothing will ever be known, it is too late now, or still too soon, I forget which, except that they have brought me the solution and conclusion of the whole sorry business, I mean the business of Malone (since that is what I am called now) and of the other, for the rest is no business of mine. [1318] And it was, though more unutterable, like the crumbling away of two little heaps of finest sand, or dust, or ashes, of unequal size, but diminishing together as it were
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[1318] in ratio, if that means anything, and leaving behind them, each in its own stead, the bless"edness of absence.
[1319] While this was going on I was sturggling [ ] to retrieve my pencil, by fits and starts.
[1319|001] My pencil.
[1320] It is a little Venus, still green no doubt, with five or six facets, pointed at both ends and so short there is just room, between them, for my thumb and the two adjacent fingers, gathered together in a little vice.
[1321] I use the two points turn and turn about, sucking them frequently, I love to suck.
[1322] And when they go quite blunt I strip them with my nails which are long, yellow, sharp and brittle for want of chalk or is it phosphate.
[1323] So little by little my little pencil dwindles, inevitably, and the day is fast approaching when nothing will remain but a fragment too tiny to hold.
[1324] So I write as lightly as I can. But the lead is hard and would leave no trace if I wrote too lightly.
[1325] But I say to myself, Between a hard lead with which one dare not write too lightly, if a trace is to be left, and a soft fat lead which blackens the page almost without touching it, what possible difference can there ben[₰] from the point of view of durability.
[1326] Ah yes, I have my little pastimes.
[1327] The strange thing is I have another pencil, made in France, a long cylinder hardly broached, in the bed with me somewhere I think.
[1328] So I have nothing to worry about, on this score.
[1329] And yet I do worry.
[1330] Now while I was hunting for my pencil I made a curious discovery.
[1331] The floor is whitening.
[1332] I struck it several blows with my stick and the sound it gacve forth was at once sharp and dull, wrong in fact.
[1333] So it was not without some trepidation that I inspected the other great planes, above and all about me.
[1334] And all this time the sand kept
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[1334] trickling away and I saying to myself, It is gone for ever, meaning fof course the pencil.
[1335] And I saw that all these superficies, or should I say infraficies, the horizontal as well as the perpendicular, though they do not look particularly perpendicular from here, had visibly blanched since my last examination of them, dating from when I do not know I know not when.
And this is all the more singular as the tendency of things in general is I believe rather to darken, as time wears on, with of course the exception of our mortal remains and certain parts of the body which lost lose their natural colour and from which the blood recedes, in the long run.
[1336] Does this mean there is more light here now, now that I know what is going on?
[1337] No, I fear not, it is the same grey as heretofore, literally sparkling at times, then growing murky and dim, thickening is perhaps the word, until all things are blotted out except the window which seems in a manner of speaking to be my umbilicus, so that I say to myself, When it too goes out I shall know more or less where I am.
[1338] No, all I mean is this, that when I open staring wide my eyes I see at the confines of this restless gloom a gleaming and shimmering as of bones, which was not hitherto the case, to the best of my knowledge. And I can evern distinctly remember the paper-hangings or wall-paper still clinging in places to the walls and covered with a writhing mass of roses, violets and other flowers in such profusion that it seemed to me I had never seen so many in the whole course of my life, nor of such beauty.
[1339] But now they seem to be all gone, quite gone, and if there were no flowers on the ceiling there was no doubt something else,