[p. 66r][1339] cupids perhaps, gone too, without leaving a trace. [1340] And while I was busy pursuing my pencil a moment came when my exercise-book, almost a child's, fell also to the ground. But it I very soon recovered, slipping the hook of my stick into one of the rents in the cover and hoisting it gently towards me. [1341] And during all this time, so fertile in incidents and mishaps, in my head I suppose all was streaming and emptying away as through a sluice, to my great joy, until finally nothing remained, either of Malone or of the other. [1342] And what is more I was able to follow without difficulty the various phases of this deliverance and felt no surprise at its irregular course, now rapid, now slow, so crystal clear was my understanding of the reasons why this could not be otherwise. [1343] And I rejoiced furthermore, quite apart from the spectacle, at the thought that I now knew what I had to do, I whose every move has always been a groping, and whose motionlessness too was a kind of groping, yes, I have greatly groped stockstill. [1344] And here again naturally I was utterly deceived, I mean in imagining I had grasped at last the true nature of my absurd[₰] tribulations, but not so utterly as to feel the need to reproach myself with it now. [1345] For even as I said, How easy and beautiful it all is!, in the same breath I said, All will grow dark again. [1346] And it is without excessive sorrow that I see us again as we are, namely to be removed grain by grain until the hand, wearied, begins to play, scooping us up and letting us trickle back into the same place, dreamily as the saying is. [1347] For I knew it would be so, even as I said, At last! [1348] And I must say that to me at least and for as long as I can remember the sensation is familiar of a blind and tired hand delving feebly in my particles and letting
[p. 67r][1348] them trickle between its fingers. [1349] And sometimes, when all is quiet, I feel it plunged in me up to the elbow, but gentle, and as though sleeping. [1350] But soon it stirs, wakes, fondles, clutches, ransacks, ravages, avenging its failure to scatter me with one sweep. [1351] I can understand. [1352] But I have felt so many strange things, so many baseless things assuredly, that they are perhaps better left unsaid. [1353] To speak for example of the times when I go liquid and become like mud, what good would that do? [1354] Or of the others when I would be lost in the eye of a needle, I am so hard and contracted? [1355] No, those are well-meaning squirms that get me nowhere. [1356] I was speaking then was I not of my little pastimes and I think about to say that I ought to content myself with them, instead of launching forth on all this ballsaching poppycock about life and death, if that is what it is all about, and I suppose it is, for nothing was ever about anything else to the best of my recollection. [1357] But what it is all about exactly I could no more say, at the present moment, than take up my bed and walk. [1358] It's vague, life and death. [1359] I must have had my little private idea on the subject when I began, otherwise I would not have begun, I would have held my peace, I would have gone on peacefully being bored to howls, having my little fun and games with the cones and cylinders, the millet grains beloved of birds and other panics, until someone was kind enough to come and coffin me. [1360] But it is gone clean out of my head, my little private idea. [1361] No matter, I have just had another. [1362] Perhaps it is the same one back again, ideas are so alike, when you get to know them. [1363] Be born, that's the brainwave now, that is to say live long enough to get acquainted with free car
[p. 68r][1363] bonic gas, then say thanks for the nice time and go. [1364] That has always been my dream at bottom, [1365] all the things that have always been my dream at bottom, [1366] so many strings and never a shaft. [1368] Yes, an old foetus, that's what I am now, hoar and impotent, mother is done for, I've rotted her, she'll drop me with the help of gangrene, perhaps papa is at the party too, I'll land head-foremost mewling in the charnel-house, not that I'll mewl, not worth it. [1369] All the stories I've told myself, clinging to the putrid mucus, and swelling, swelling, [1370] saying, Got it at last, my legend. [1371] But why this sudden heat, has anything happened, anything changed? [1372] No, the answer is no, I shall never get born and therefore never get dead, and a good job too. [1373] And if I tell of me and of that other who is my little one, it is as always for want of love, well I'll be buggered, I wasn't expecting that, want of a homuncule, I can't stop. [1374] And yet it sometimes seems to me I did get born and had a long life and met Jackson and wandered in the towns, the woods and wildernesses and tarried by the seas in tears before the islands and peninsulas where night lit the little brief yellow lights of man and all night the great white and coloured beams[₰] shining in the caves where I was happy, crouched on the sand in the lee of the rocks with the smell of the seaweed and the wet rock and the howling of the wind the waves whipping me with foam or sighing on the beach softly clawing the shingle, no, not happy, I was never that, but wishing night would never end and morning never come when men wake and say, Come on, we'll soon be dead, let's make the most of it. [1375] But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have al
[p. 69r][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, unhappy, 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 [₰]. [1380] How did I know it was 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 redressers 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 matter, [1394] he is mine now, [1395] living flesh and needless to say male, living with that evening 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 railway [1396] and the [⁁] 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
[p. 70r][1400] you begin to wonder if you have not died without knowing and gone to hell or been born again into an even worse place than before. [1401] Then it is hard to believe in those brief years when the bakers were often i ndulgent, at close of day, and baking-apples, I was always a great man for apples, to be had almost for the whinging of you knew your way about, and a little sunshine and shelter for those who direly needed them. [1403] And there he is as good as gold on the bench, his back to the river, and dressed as follows, though clothes don't matter, I know, I know, but he'll never have any others, if I know anything about it. [1404] He has had them a long time already, to judge by their decay, but no matter, they are the last. [1405] But most remarkable of all is his greatcoat, in the sense that it covers him completely and screens him from view. [1406] For it is so well buttoned, from top to bottom, by means of fifteen buttons at the very least, set at intervals of three or four inches at the very most, that nothing is to be seen of what goes on inside. [1407] And even the two feet, flat on the ground demurely side by side, even they are partly hidden by this coat, in spite of the double flexion of the body, first at the base of the trunk, where the thighs form a right angle with the pelvis, and then again at the knees, where the shins resume the perpendicular. For the posture is completely lacking in abandon, and but for the absence of bonds you might think he was bound to the bench, the posture is so stiff and set in the sharpness of its planes and angles, like that of the Colossus of Memnon, dearly loved son of Dawn. [1408] In other words when he walks, or simply stands stockstill, the tails of