...of the depressed

No, not our sort of words, they are too light, too limp, they would never be able to cross what is now opening, yawning, between us... an immense chasm... but compact, heavy words over which no wave of gaiety or sensuality has ever rippled, which no pulse has ever made to beat, no breath to falter... words which are smooth and hard all over like Basque pelotas, which I am propelling at him with all my strength, at him, a well-trained player who is standing in the right place, and who catches them without flinching precisely where they are designed to fall, in the solidly-woven hollow of his chistera.
Not our words, but solemn, glacial nonce-words, dead words in a dead language.

For years, for months, for days, for ever, it was there, behind me, my inseparable reverse side... and now at a stroke, just with these two words, with a terrible wrench, I turn myself upside down... As you see, my obverse has become my reverse. I am what I had to be. Order has finally been restored. Ich sterbe.

With these well-honed words, with this blade of excellent make - I have never used it, nothing has ever blunted it - I anticipate the moment, and I, myself, cut: Ich sterbe.

Prepared to co-operate, so docile and full of goodwill, before you can do it, I put myself in your place, outside myself, and in the same way as you will do it, in the very same terms that you will use, I certify the event.

I gather together all my strength, I raise myself up, I pull towards me, I lower on to myself, the flagstone, the heavy tombstone... and, to make sure that it is in exactly the right place, I lie down underneath it...

But perhaps, as he was raising the flagstone, as he was holding it above him with outstretched arms and was about to lower it on himself... just before he fell back under it... was there maybe something like a faint palpitation, a barely perceptible quivering, a minute trace of living hope... Ich sterbe... And what if the man observing him, and who was the only one who could know, were to intervene, to grasp him firmly, to hold him back... No, though, there's no one, no voice... It's already the void, it's silence.


All we have here, as you see, are a few slight eddies, a few brief ripples captured amongst the infinite number that these words produce. If some of you find this game diverting, they may - with patience and time - amuse themselves by discovering others. At all events they may be sure that they are not mistaken, for everything they may perceive is really there, in every one of us: circles that continue to increase when, propelled from such a distance and with such force, these words fall on us and shake us to the depths of our being: Ich sterbe.

[The Use of Speech, Sarraute, N.]