[p. 40r][0864] stations were short-lived, for he was still young. [0865] And of a sudden he is off again, on his wanderings, passing from light to shadow, from shadow to light, unheedingly.
[0866] When I stop, as just now, the noises begin again, strangely loud, those whose turn it is.
[0867] So that I seem to have again the hearing of my boyhood.
[0868] Then in my bed, in the dark, on stormy nights, I could tell from one another, in the outcry without, the leaves, the boughs, the groaning trunks, even the grasses and the house that sheltered me.
[0869] Each tree had its own cry, just as no two swhispered alike, when the air was still.
[0870] I heard afar the iron gates clashing and dragging at their posts and the wind rushing between their bars.
[0871] There was nothing, not even the sand on the paths, that did not have utter its cry.
[0872] The still nights too, still as the grave as the saying is, were nights of storm for me, clamorous with countless pantings. These I amused myself with identifying, as I lay there.
[0873] Yes, I got great amusement, when young, from their so-called silence.
[0874] The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it.
[0875] It was the barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them.
[0876] It came down to me in the house where I lay, in the house in the plain, wild and soft, at the limit of earshot, soon weary.
[0877] The dogs of the valley replied with their gross bay all fangs and jaws and foam.
[0878] From the hills another joy came down, I mean the[⁁] brief[⁁] scattered lights that sprang up on their slopes at nightfall,
[p. 41r]
[0878] merging in blurs scarcely brighter than the sky, less bright than the stars, and which the palest moon extinguished.
[0879] They were things that scarcely were, on the confines of silence and dark, and soon ceased.
[0880] So I reason now, at my ease.
[0881] Standing before my hight[₰] window I gave myself to them, waiting for them to end, for my joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy.
[0882] But our business at the moment is less with these futilities than with my ears from which there spring two impetuous tufts of no doubt yellow hair, yellowed by wax and lack of care, and so long that the lobes are hidden.
[0883] I note then, without emotion, that of late their hearing seems to have improved.
[0884] Oh not that I was ever even incompletely deaf.
[0885] But for a long time now I have been hearing things confusedly.
[0886] There I go again.
[0887] What is I mean is possibly this, that the noises of the world, so various in themselves and which I used to be so cleaver clever at distinguishing from one another, had been dinning at me fror so long, always the same old noises, as gradually to have merged into a single noise, so that all I heard was one vast continuous buzzing.
[0888] The volume of sound perceived remained no doubt the same, I had simply lost the faculty of decomposing it.
[0889] The noises of nature, of mankind and even my own were all jumbled together in one and the same unbridled gibberish.
[0890] AEnough.
[0891] I would willingly attribute part of my shall I say my misfortunes to this disordered sense were I not unfortunately rather inclined to look upon it as a blessing.
[0892] Misfortunes, blessings, I have no time to pick my words, I am in a hurry to be done.
[p. 42r]
[0893] And yet no, I am in no hurry.
[0894] Decidedly this evening I shall say nothing that is not false, I mean nothing that is not calculated to leave[⁁] me[⁁] in doubt as to my real intentions.
[0895] For it is evening, even night, one of the darkest I can remember,[0896] I have a short memory.
[0897] My little finger glides before my pencil across the page and gives warning, falling over the edge, that the end of the line is near.
[0898] But in the other direction, I mean of course vertically, I have nothing to guide me.
[0899] I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.
[0900] It is in order to know where I have got to, where he has got to.
[0901] At first I did not write, I just said the thing.
[0902] Then I forgot what I had said.
[0903] A minimum of memory is indispensable, if one is to live really.
[0904] Take his family, for example, I really know practically nothing about his family any more.
[0905] But that does not worry me, there is a record of it somewhere.
[0906] It is the only way to keep an eye on him.
[0907] But as far as I myself am concerned the same necessity does not arise, or does it?
[0909] And yet I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exerr[₰]cise-book as about him.
[0910] It is because it is no longer I, I must have said so long ago, but another whose life is just beginning.
[0911] It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old all down the unchanging days and die one day like any other day, only shorter.
[0912] That is my excuse.
[0913] But there must be others, no eless excellent.
[0914] Yes, it is quite dark.
[0915] I can see nothing.
[0916] I
[p. 43r]
[0916] can scarcely even see the window-pane, or the wall forming with it so sharp a contrast that it oftebn looks like the edge of an abyss.
[0917] I hear the noise of my little finger as it glides over the paper and then that so different of the pencil following after.
[0918] That is what surprises me and makes me say that something must have changed.
[0919] Whence that child I might have been, why not?
[0920] And I hear also, there we are at last, I hear a choir, far enough away for me not to hear it when it goes soft.
[0921] It is a song I know, I don't know how, and when it fades, and when it dies quite away, it goes on inside me, but too slow, or too fast, [0922] for when it comes on the air to me again it is not together with mine, but behind, or ahead.
[0923] It is a mixed choir, or I am greatly deceived.
[0924] With children too perhaps.
[0925] I have the absurd feeling it is conducted by a woman.
[0926] Irt has been singing the same song for a long time now.
[0927] They must be rehearsing.
[0928] It belong[⁁]s already to the long past, it has uttered fot eh for the last time the triumphal cry on which it ends.
[0929] Can it be Easter Week?
[0930] Thus with the year Seasons return.
[0931] If it can could not this song I have just heard, and which quite franjkly is not quit yet quite stilled within me, could not this song have simply been to the hnour and honour and glory of him who was the first to rise from the dead, to him who saved me, twenty centuries in advance?
[0932] Did I say the first?
[0933] The final bawl lends colour to this view.
[0934] I fear I must have fallen asleep again. [0935] In vain I grope, I cannot find my exercise-book. [0936] But I still have the pencil in my hand. [0937] I shall have to wait for day to break. [0938] God knows what
[p. 44r][0938] I am going to do till then.
[0939] I have just written, I fear I must have fallen, etc.
[0940] I hope this is not too great a distortion of the truth.
[0941] I now add these few lines, before departing from myself again.
[0942] I do not depart frpom myself now with the same avidity as a week ago for example.
[0943] This For this must be going on now for over a week, it must be over a week since I said, I shall soon be quite dead at last, etc.
[0944] Wrong again.
[0945] That is not what I said, I could swear to it, that is what I wrote.
[0946] This last phrase seems familiar, [0947] suddenly I seem to have written it somewhere before, or spoken it, word for word.
[0948] Yes, I shall soon be, etc., that is what I wrote when I realized I did not know what I had said, at the beginning of my say, and subsequently, and that consequently the plan I had formed, to live, and cause to live, at last, to play at last and die alive, was going the way of all my other plans.
[0949] I think the dawn was not so slow in coming as I had feared, [0950] I really do.
[0951] But I feared nothing, I fear nothing any more.
[0952] High summer is truly at hand.
[0953] Towar Turned towards the window I saw the pane shiver at last, before the ghastly sunrise.
[0954] It is no ordinary pane, it brings me sunset and it brings me sunrise.
[0955] The exercise-book had fallen to the ground.
[0956] I took a long time to find it.
[0957] It was under the bed.
[0958] How are such things possible?
[0959] I took a long time to recover it.
[0960] I had to harpoon it.
[0961] It is not pierced through and through, but it is in a bad way.
[0962] It is a thick exercise-book.
[0963] I hope it will see me out.
[0964] From now on