MS-WU-MSS008-3-49

[0231] perhaps it was A one day at one place, then B another at another,
then a third the rock and I, and so on for the other components,
the cows, the sky, the sea, the mountains. [0232] I can't believe it.

[0233] No, I will not lie, I can easily conceive it. [0234] No matter, no matter,
let us go on, as if all arose from one and the same weariness,
^{on and on hoarding,} until there is no room, no light, for
any more. [0235] What is certain is that the man with the stick did not
pass by again that night, because I would have heard him,if he had.

[0236] I don't say I would have seen him, I say I would have heard him.
[0237] I sleep little and that little in the daytime. [0238] Oh not systematically,
in my ^{life without end} I have dabbled with every kind of
sleep, but at the time now coming back to me I took my doze in the
daytime and, what is more, in the morning. [0239] Let me hear nothing of
the moon, in my night there is no moon, and if it happens that I
speak of the stars it's inadvertently.

[0240] Now of all the noises that
night not one was of those heavy uncertain steps, or of that club
with which ^he sometimes smote the earth until it quaked. [0241] How
agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period
of vacillation, in one's first impressions. [0242] Perhaps that is what
tempers the pangs of death. [0243] Not that I was so conclusively, I mean
confirmed, in my first impressions with regard to — wait — ^C.

[0244] For the wagons and carts which a little before dawn went thundering
by, on their way to market with fruit, eggs, butter and perhaps
cheese, in one of these perhaps he would have been found, overcome
by fatigue or by discouragement, perhaps even dead. [0245] Or he might
have gone ^back to the town by another way too far away for me to
hear its sounds, or by little paths through the fields, crushing