6
again, or covered with ideas I have never had. The
words themselves come invested in strange masks, or
bare and different from each other. Bursted balloons.
Pastimes, pleasures, leisure, salt of life, all seem strange
customs, rites devised to hasten death along. Fire is
what I find most mysterious of all. The novel I kept
in my pocket during the entire journey has remained
there and 1 reassemble in it my only memories of
human life. Preposterous existence bounded only by
the most elementary of questions. I take, for instance,
from my book, the character called George, hotelkeeper.
How the emblems of all the trades balance themselves
unhappily in the blue city of the vision. This horrible
limitation, the branch of holly which the man fixed
above his door one morning condemned him to be
nothing but an innkeeper for all eternity. Is it not true
that in books sudden illuminations flash between the
conventional characters one longs to resemble? The
choice between two destinies is tragically lost in the
disordered movements of the heart. A very beautiful
woman, two or three singular exaltations, a moment of
perfect happiness, the entire life of a citizen of the
world reduces itself to a few metaphors more wretched
and vulgar than a carpenter’s shop : the split up wood
hardly arouses any enthusiasm. Through staring into
space for a long time there grows in my breast the
image of the red and blue infinite in which life pulses
at a given speed. Adjust yourself any way you please:
to regard the universe, or to interrogate your heart;
it cannot be done without fatigue. All ends with a red
lamp balanced against the wind, and later, the horses
having delivered the parcel, trotting briskly along the
pavement of the suburbs.
Sun of cries without reason, mad plants, the earth
flees we know not where and we press the tablets of
physical law against our vest-pockets with little
commendatory smiles. With what great ingenuity we
bind for ourselves with ribbon-formulae a bouquet of
marguerites and of roses, the functions of space and
time yielding indulgently to our will! In the meantime
1 am quite beautifully lost in duration, and my move
ments are restricted from just here to there. But I feel
more and more, 1 almost said with every day, the