This document was written with the typewriter, and contains edits in typewriter, black ink, blueblack ink, pencil. In this visualisation, unclear words are placed between [brackets].
[p. 21r]
[0511] ilmaginings and dreads.
[0512] And a little less well endowed with strength and courage he too would have abandoned and despaired of ever knowing what manner of being he was, and how he was going to live, and lived vanquished, blindly, in a mad world, in the midst of strangers.
[0513] From these reveries he emerged tired and pale, which confirmed his father's impression that he was the victim of lascivious speculations.
[0514] He ought to play more games, he would say.
[0515] We are[⁁] getting on, getting on.
[0516] They told me he would be a good athleten athlete, said Mr Saposcat, and now he is not on any team.
[0517] His studies take up all his time, said Mrs Saposcat.
[0518] And he is always last, said Mr Saposcat.
[0519] He is fond of walking, said Mrs Saposcat, the long walks in the country do him good.
[0520] Then Mr Saposcat wried his face, at the thought of his son's long solitary walks and the good they did him.
[0521] And sometimes he was carried away to the point of saying, It might have been better to have had him taught put him to a trade.
[0522] Whereupon it was usual, though not compulsory, for Sapo to go away, while his mother exclaimed, Oh Adrian, you have hurt his feelings!
[0523] We are getting on. [0524] Nothing is less like me than this patient, reasonable child, struggling all alone for years to shed a little light upon himself, avid of the least gleam, a stranger to the joys of darkness. [0525] Here truly is the air
[p. 22r]
[0525] I needed, a lively tenuous air, far from the nourishing murk that is killing me.
[0526] I shall never go back into this carcass except to find out its time.
[0527] I want to be there a little before the plunge, close for the last time the old hatch on top of me, say goodbye to the holds where I have lived, go down with my refuge.
[0528] I was always sentimental.
[0529] But between now and then I have time to frolic, ashore, in the brave company I have always longed for, always searched for, and which would never have me.
[0530] Yes, now my mind is easy, I know the game is won, I lost them all till now, but it's the last that counts.
[0531] A very fine achievement I must say, or rather would, if I did not fear to contradict myself. [0532] Fear to contradict myself!
[0533] If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there.
[0534] And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true.
[0535] And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why.
[0536] So I near the bgoal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living.
[0537] And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.
[0538] Very pretty.
[0539] The summer holidays. [0540] In the morning he took private lessons. [0541] You'll have us in the poorhouse, said Mrs Saposcat. [0542] It's a good investment, said Mr Saposcat. [0543] In the afternoon he left the house, with his books under his arm, on the pretext that he worked better in the open air, no, without a word. [0544] Once clear of the town he hid his books under a stone and ranged the countryside. [0545] It was the season when the labours of the peasants reach their paroxysm
[p. 23r][0545] and the long bright days are too short for all there is to do. [0546] And often they took advantage of the moon to make a last journey between the fields, perhaps far away, and the barn or threshing-floor, or to overhaul the machines and get them ready for the impending dawn. [0547] The impending dawn.
[0548] I fell asleep.
[0549] But I do not want to sleep.
[0550] There is no time for sleep in my time-table.
[0551] I do not want - no, I have no explanations to give.
[0552] Coma is for the living. The living.
[0553] Thery were always more than I could bear, all, no, I don't lmean that, but groaning with tedium I watched them come and go, then I killed them, or took their place, or to flight fled.
[0554] I feel within me the glow of that old frenzy, but I know it will set me on fire no more.
[0555] I stop everything and wait.
[0556] Sapo stands on one leg, motionless, his strange eyes closed.
[0557] The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures.
[0558] The little cloud drifting before their glorious sun will darken the earth as long as I please.
[0559] Live and invent.
[0560] I have tried.
[0561] I must have tried.
[0562] Invent.
[0563] It is not the right[₰] word.
[0564] Neither is live.
[0565] No matter.
[0566] I have tried.
[0567] While within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down, roaring, ravening, lacerating rending[⁁].
[0568] I have done that.
[0569] And all alone, well hidden, played the clown, all alone, hour after hour, motionless, often standing, spellbound, groaning.
[0570] That's right, groan.
[0571] I couldn't play.
[0572] I turned till I was dizzy, clapped my hands, ran, shouted, saw myself winning, saw myself losing,
[p. 24r]
[0572] rejoicing, malamenting.
[0573] Then suddenly I threw myself on the playthings, if there were any, or on a child, to change his joy to howling, or I fled, to hiding.
[0574] The grown-ups pursued me, the j[u] just, caught me, beat me, hounded me back into the round, the game, the jollity.
[0575] For I was already in the toils of earnestness.
[0576] That has been my disease.
[0577] I was born grave as others syphilitixc.
[0578] And gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent, I know what I mean.
[0579] But at each fresh attempt I lost my head, fled to my shadows as to sanctuary, to his lap who can neither live nor suffer the sight of others living.
[0581] I say living without knowing what it is.
[0582] I tried to live without knowing what I was trying.
[0583] Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing.
[0584] I wonder why I speak of all this.
[0585] Ah yes, to relieve the tedium.
[0586] Live and cause to live.
[0587] There is no use no[₰] indicting words., [0588] Tthey are no shoddier than what they peddle.
[0589] After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another.
[0590] How false all this is.
[0592] No time now to explain.
[0593] I began again.
[0594] But little by little with a different aim, [0595] no longer in order to succeed, but in order to fail. [0596] Nuance.
[0597] What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him waiting for me always, who needed me and whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched over me, who suffered
[p. 25r][0597] every time I left him, whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have never seen. [0598] There I am forgetting myself again. [0599] My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and whom I try to envy, of whose crass adventures I can now tell at last, I don't know how. [0600] Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others. [0601] How could I have, who never tried? [0602] To show myself now, on the point of vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, and by the same grace, that would be no ordinary last straw. [0603] Then live, long enough to feel, behind my closed eyes, other eyes close. [0604] What an end.
[0605] The market.
[0606] The inadequacy of the exchanges between rural and urban areas had not escaped the excellent youth.
[0607] He had mustered, on this subject, the following considerations, some perhaps close to, others no doubt far from, the truth.
[0608] In his country the problem - no, I can't do it.
[0609] The peasants.
[0610] His visits to.
[0611] I can't.
[0612] Assembled in the farmyard they watched him depart, on stumbling, wavering feet, as though they scarcely felt the ground.
[0613] Often he stopped, stood tottering a moment, then suddenly was off again, in a new direction.
[0614] So he went, lift limp, drifting, as though tossed by the earth.
[0615] And when, after a halt, he started off again, it was like a big thistle-down plucked by the wind from the place where it had settled.
[0615|001] There is a choice of images.
[0616] I have rummaged a little in my things, sorting them out