The Tunnel

by Ernesto Sabato

There are in our society horizontal strata formed of persons with similar tastes, and within those strata, casual meetings (are there such things?) are not unusual, especially when the cause of the stratification is a quality common to a very few. I have had the experience of running into a person in Berlin, then in a remote village in Italy, and finally in a bookstore in Buenos Aires. Is it reasonable to attribute those repeated meetings to chance? But I am belaboring the obvious: any person devoted to music, or Esperanto, or spiritism, will know that.

It is not unusual during nights of insomnia to act more decisively than during the daylight hours.

everything I had thought and planned during all those months (including the present moment) was ridiculous beyond belief, another of my typical imaginings, as preposterous as the recreation of a dinosaur starting from a single broken vertebra.

It is curious, but life is a process of constructing future memories; at this very moment, here where I sit facing the sea, I know that I am creating memories that one day will bring me melancholy and despair.