...of thought

Anne saw him coming without surprise, this inevitable being in whom she recognised the one who might try in vain to escape, but would meet again every day. Each time, he came straight to her, following with an inflexible pace a path laid straight over the sea, the forests, even the sky. Each time, when the world was emptied of everything but the sun and this motionless being standing at her side, Anne, enveloped in his silent immobility, carried away by this profound insensitivity which revealed her, feeling all the calm of the universe condensing in her through him, just as the sparkling chaos of the ultimate noon was resounding, mingled with the silence, pressed by the greatest peace, not daring to make a move or to have a thought, seeing herself burned, dying, her eyes, her cheeks aflame, mouth half-open exhaling, as a last breath, her obscure forms into the glare of the sun, perfectly transparent in death outside this opaque corpse which stood by, becoming ever more dense, and, more silent than silence, undermined the hours and deranged time. A just and sovereign death, inhuman and shameful moment which began anew each day, and from which she could not escape. Each day he returned at the same time to the same place. And it was precisely the same moment, the same garden as well. With the ingenuousness of Joshua stopping the sun to gain time, Anne believed that things were going on. But the terrible trees, dead in their green foliage which could not dry out, the birds which flew above her without, alas, deceiving anyone or succeeding in making themselves pass for living, stood solemn guard over the horizon and made her begin again eternally the scene she had lived the day before. Nevertheless, that day (as if a corpse borne from one bed to another were really changing place) she arose, walked before Thomas and drew him toward the little woods nearby, along a road on which those who came from the other direction saw him recede, or thought he was motionless. In fact, he was really walking and, with a body like the others, though three-quarters consumed, he penetrated a region where, if he himself disappeared, he immediately saw the others fall into another nothingness which placed them further from him than if they had continued to live. On this road, each man he met died. Each man, if Thomas turned away his eyes, died with him a death which was not announced by a single cry. He looked at them, and already he saw them lose all resemblance beneath his glance, with a tiny wound in the forehead through which their face escaped. They did did not disappear, but they did not appear again. As far away as they became visible, they were shapeless and mute. Nearer, if he touched them, if he directed toward them not his glance, but the glance of this dazzling and invisible eye which he was, every moment, completely... and nearer yet, almost blending with them, taking them either for his shadow or for dead souls, breathing them, licking them, coating himself with their bodies, he received not the slightest sensation, not the slightest image, as empty of them as they were empty of him. Finally they passed by. They went away, definitively. They slipped down a vertiginous slope toward a country whence nothing was any longer visible, except perhaps, like a great trail of light, their last phosphorescent stare on the horizon. It was a terrible and mysterious blast. Behind him there were no more words, no silence, no backward and no forward. The space surrounding him was the opposite of space, infinite thought in which those who entered, their heads veiled, existed only for nothing.

[Thomas The Obscure, Blanchot, M.]