My mother. I don’t think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.
I suppose we blathered.
Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now for half a century.
After all this window is whatever I want it to be, up to a point, that’s right, don’t compromise yourself. What strikes me to begin with is how much rounder it is than it was, so that it looks like a bull’s-eye, or a porthole. No matter, provided there is something on the other side.
I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas, This is life.
Oh not that I was ever even incompletely deaf.
The fear of falling is the source of many a folly. It is a disaster. I suppose the wisest thing now is to live it over again, meditate upon it and be edified. It is thus that man distinguishes himself from the ape and rises, from discovery to discovery, towards the light.
But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets.
It’s not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?
It is so easy to accept, so easy to refuse, when the call is heard, so easy, so easy. But to us, in our windowlessness, in our bloodheat, in our hush, to us who could not hear the wind, nor see the sun, what call could come, from the kind of weather we liked, but a call so faint as to mock acceptance, mock refusal?
Why then the human voice, rather than a hyena’s howls or the clanging of a hammer? Answer, so that the shock may not be too great, when the writhings of true lips meet his gaze. Between them they find a rejoinder to everything. And how they enjoy talking, they know there is no worse torment, for one not in the conversation.
I didn’t understand women at that period. I still don’t for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains.
And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.
I saw the mountain, impassible, cavernous, secret, where from morning to night I’d hear nothing but the wind, the curlews, the clink like distant silver of the stone-cutters’ hammers.
And if I have always behaved like a pig, the fault lies not with me but with my superiors, who corrected me only on points of detail instead of showing me the essence of the system...
I them, the master, myself, we are all innocent, enough. Innocent of what, no one knows, of wanting to know, wanting to be able, of all this noise about nothing, of this long sin against the silence that enfolds us, we wont ask any more, what it covers, this innocence we have fallen to, it covers everything, all faults, all questions, it puts an end to questions.
Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire.
On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.
Fortunately I did not need affection.
Soon his body was quiet.