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And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.
Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.
how can you feel privileged not to have something that everyone else has? I felt they were deceiving me.
By remaining silent, they were creating a girl who didn’t know and who would regard them as the custodians of a treasure. Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren’t entirely powerless? They sometimes claimed it was out of modesty, but I could see perfectly well that, among themselves, they had no modesty. They whispered and tittered and were lewd. I would never make love, they would never make love again: perhaps that made us equal and they were trying to console themselves by depriving me of the only thing they could.
Talking is existing.
‘I don’t know what all this may lead to,’ I told her, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting: in our absurd existence, I’ve invented something unexpected.’
I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick by. Maybe that was why they didn’t like me, perhaps the mere fact of my existence made them cry.
‘Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest. One day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons I can’t imagine today.’
I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.
Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment and carries off its prey, and I didn’t notice the change.
I told myself that that was perhaps how, in the time of the humans, people said goodbye to the body of a cherished lover, by trying to engrave them in their memory.
but I still love looking at my face. I don’t know if it’s beautiful or ugly, but it is the only human face I ever see. I smile at it and receive a friendly smile back.
I have a few drops of blood left, that is the only libation I can offer destiny, which has chosen me.
but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?
If I hadn’t fallen ill, I think I’d have set off again all the same, and would still be walking, because I have never had anything else to do.
Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others,
The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come—I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead,
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Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to—really had a very vivid imagination.
