This document was written with the typewriter, and contains edits in typewriter, black ink, blueblack ink, blue ink, pink ink, pencil. In this visualisation, unclear words are placed between [brackets].
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[1447] without an atom of common sense or lucidity.
[1448] But they were the best I had.
[1449] Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn't a state of being even worse than life.
[1450] So I found it natural not to rush into it and, when I forgot myself to the point of trying, to stop in time.
[1451] It's my only excuse.
[1452] So I crawled into some hole somewhere I suppose and waited, half-sleeping,[₰] half sighing, groaning and laughing, or feeling my body, to see if anything had changed, for the morning frenzy to abate.
[1453] Then I resumed my spirals.
[1454] And as to saying what became of me, and where I went, in the months and perhaps the years that followed, no.
[1455] For I weary of these inventions and others beckon to me.
[1456] But in order to blacking blacken a few more pages may I say I spent some time at the seaside, without incident.
[1457] There are people the sea doesn't suit, they [⁁]who prefer the mountains or the plain.
[1458] Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else.
[1459] Much of my life has ebbed away before this shivering expanse, to the sound of the waves in storm and calm, and the claws of the surf.
[1460] Before, no, more than before, one with, spread on the sadnd, or in a cave.
[1461] In the sand I was in my element, letting it trickle between my fingers, scooping holes that I filled in a moment later or that filled themselves in, flinging casting it in the air by handfuls, rolling in it.
[1462] And in the cave, lit by the beacons at night, I knew what to do in order to be no worse off than anywhere else [⁁]elsewhere.
[1463] And that my land went no further, in one direction at least, dd did not displease me.
[1464] And to feel there was one direction at least in which I could go no further, without first wetting myself [⁁]getting wet, and then drowining myself [⁁]drowned, was a blessing.
[1465] For I have always said, First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.
[1466] But don't imagine my region ended at the coast, that would be a grave mistake.
[1467] For it was this sea too, its reefs and distqant islands, and its hidden depths.
[1468] And I too wonce went forth on it, in a sort of oarless
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[1468] skiff, but I paddled with an old bit of driftwood.
[1469] And I sometimes wonder if I ever came back, from this [⁁]that voyage.
[1470] For [if?] 
if I see myself putting to sea, and the long hours without landfall, I do not see the return, the tossing on the breakers, and I do not hear the frail keel grating on the shore.
[1471] I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones.
[1472] They were pebbles but I call them stones.
[1473] Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store.
[1474] I distributed them equally among [⁁]between my four pockets and sucked them turn and turn about.
[1475] This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way.
[1476] I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets, these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat.
[1477] Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it.
[1478] In this way [⁁]Thus there were always still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones.
[1479] And when the desire to suck took holdoof me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time.
[1480] And while I sucked it I rearranged the other eight stones in the way I have just described.
[1481] And so on.
[1482] But this solution did not satisfy me fully.
[1483] Fior it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four.
[1484] In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about.
[1485] But I shook [⁁]shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket.
[1486] But this
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[1486] was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me.
[1487] So I began to look for something else.
[1488] And the first thing I hit upon was that I might do better to transfer the stones four by four, instead of one by one, that is to say, during the sucking, to take the three stones remaining in the right pocket of my greatcoat and replace them by the four in the right pocket of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my greatcoat, and finally these by the three in [⁁]from the right pocket of my greatcoat, plus the one, as soon as I had finished sucking it, which was in my mouth.
[1489] Yes, it seemed to me at first that by so doing I would arrive at a better result.
[1490] But on further reflection I had to change my mind,[₰] and confess that the circulation of the stones four by four came to exactly the same thing as their circulation one by one.
[1491] For if I was certain of finding each time, in the right pocket of my greatcoat, four stones totally different from their immediate predecessors, the possibility nevertheless remaineed of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished, but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about.
[1492] So I had to seek elsewhere than in the mode of circulation.
[1493] For no matter how I caused the stones to circulate, I always ran the same risk.
[1494] It was obvious that by increasing the number of my pockets I was bound to increase my chances of enjoying my stones in the way I planned, that is to say one after the other until their number was exhausted.
[1495] Had I had eight pockets, for example, instead of the four I did have, then even the most diabolical hazard could not have prevented me from sucking at leatst eight of my sixteen stones, turn and turn about.
[1496] The fact of the matter [⁁]The truth is is,[₰] I should have needeed sixteen pockets for all my anxiety to be dispelled [⁁]in order to be quite easy in my mind.. [1497] And for a long time I could see no other conclusion [!] but [than?] this, that short of haveing sixteen
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[1497] pockets, each with its stone, I would [⁁]could never reach the goal I had set myself, short of an extraordinary hazard.
[1498] And if at a pinch I could double the number of my pockets, were it only by dividing each pocket in two, with the help of a few satfety-pins let us say, to quadruple them seemed to be more than I could manage.
[1499] And I didn't [⁁]did not feel inclined to take all that trouble for a half-measure.
[1500] For I was beginning to lose all sense of measure, after all this wrestling and wrangling, andt to say, Either it's It's either aAll [⁁]All or nothing.
[1501] And if I was tempted for an instant to establish a more equitable proportion between my stones and my pockets, by reducing the former to the number of the latter, it was only for an instant.
[1502] For it would have been an admission of defeat.
[1503] And sitting on the shore, before the sea, the sixteen stones spread out before my eyes, I gazed at them in anger and perplexity.
[1504] For just as I had difficulty in sitting on a chair, or in an arm-chair, because of my stiff leg you understand, so I had none in sitting on the ground, because of my stiff leg and my stiffening leg, for it was about this time that my good leg, good in the sense that it was not stiff, began to stiffen.
[1505] I needed a prop under the ham you understand, and even under the whole length of the leg, the prop of the earth.
[1506] And while I gazed thus at my stones, borooding on endless [⁁]revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers, [⁁]and fell back on the strand, yes, while I held thus in msuspense [⁁]I lulled my mind and a part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim.
[1507] The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly beg[n]an to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, [⁁]in this sense, long remained obscure.
[1508] Finally I seemed to grasp that this word
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[1508] trim could not [⁁]here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and that it was my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally insoluble.
[1509] And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether right or wrong, that I finally d reached a solution, inelegant assuredly, but sound, sound.
[1510] Now I am willing to believe, indeed I firmly believe, that other solutions to this problem might have been found,and indeed my may still be found, no less sound, but much more elegant, thatn the one I shall now describe, if I can.
[1511] And I believe too,[₰] that had I been a little more insistent, a little more resistant, I could have found them myself.
[1512] But I was tired, but I was tired, and I contented myself ingloriously with the first solution that was a solution, to this problem.
[1513] But not to go over the heartbreaking stages through which I passeed before I came to it, here it is, in all its hideousness.
[1514] It was merely (merely!) a matter of putting [⁁]All (all!) that was necessary was to put for example, to begin with, six stones in the right pocket of my greatcoat, or supply-pocket, five in the right pocket of my trousers, and fi[n]ve in the left pocket of my trousers, that makes the lot, twice five ten plus six sixteen, and none, for none remained, in the left pocket of my greatcoat, which for the time being remained empty, empty of stones that is, for its usual contents remained, as well as occasional objects.
[1515] For where do you think I hid my vegetable knife, my silver, my horn and the other things, that I have not yet named, perhaps shall never name.
[1516] Good.
[1517] Now I can begin sucking [⁁]to suck.
[1518] Watch me closely.
[1519] I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one emtpty (of stones).
[1520] I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat.
[1521] And so on until the right pocket of my