5
Certain plants remain invariable; others seem as ephe
meral as my regard. Suddenly I feel myself ageing as
I lift my eyelids. I should certainly make a poor
hour-glass. .
How I could have blundered about in time; I still
wonder at this. I had accepted with real pleasure an
invitation to go to Normandy and stay at the villa of a
friend, Celeste P . . . married recently. Paris was
thinning out, and the thought of spending a few days
by the sea-shore where the air was so pure and re
freshing with the nip of salt, was by no means
unpleasant to me. It had been a superb day. The sun
brimmed over in the fields. The dust invaded the
railroad coaches, but nearing the sea we scented its
delicious tang and it went right to our hearts. Getting
off the train, I looked about me and saw that the sky
was sky-blue. Celeste advanced toward me with her
hand outstretched. Suddenly a fit of abstraction seized
me, I thought of other things: once you have thought
of other things, you are done for. Impossible to get
back to the point of departure, and following the
thread I reached some desert region at some indeter-
mined epoch of the universe. At first I did not under
stand what was happening to me. I said to myself:
„This cannot last“. Now I do not even know whether
it does last.
I have come to believe that in the temporal impasse
into which I have strayed there is no soul that lives.
Only a companion in misfortune could help me to
regain life. Together we could reconstitute time. Sim
ply a matter of comparison. Alone, I lose grip on
myself in wrestling with my identity: if I remained the
same from one minute to another how could I experience
the transformation announced by this movement of the
clock-hand? I end by losing all track of the continuity
of my thought. For in the most general sense all is
logical to me in solitude, and, writing as I am for
chance salvagers, for blind savages, or for the deaf
tides that carry my bottle, I can scarcely trust that the
language I use will ever be understood by any man
other than myself. Why, it is impossible for me to
read it over: I am only intelligible to myself in flashes.
My sheet of paper all at once becomes perfectly blank