After a week of silence I have seen clearly that if I was expressing badly what I was trying to express, there would not only be no end, but I would be glad to that there was no end. Even now, I am not sure that I am any more free than I was at the moment when I was not speaking. It may be that I am entirely mistaken. It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening. The unfortunate thing is that having waited for so many years, during which silence, immobility, and patience carried to the point of inertia did not for one single day stop deceiving me, I had to open my eyes all at once and allow myself to be tempted by a splendid thought, which I am trying in vain to bring to its knees.
Pehaps these precautions will not be precautions. For some time I lived with a person who was obsessed by the idea of my death. I had said to her: “I think that at certain moments you would like to kill me. You shouldn’t resist that desire. I’m going to write down on a piece of paper that if you kill me you will be doing what is best.” But a thought is not exactly like a person, even if it lives and acts like one. A thought demands a loyalty which makes any slyness difficult. Sometimes it is itself false, but behind this lie I still recognise something real, which I cannot betray.
Its uprightness is what actually fascinates me. When this thought appears, memory is no longer present, nor uneasiness, nor weariness, nor foreboding, nor any recalling of yesterday, nor any plan for tomorrow. It appears, and perhaps it has appeared a thousand times, ten thousand times. What, then, could be more familiar to me? But familiarity is just what has disappeared forever between us. I look at it. It lives with me. It is in my house. Sometimes it begins to eat; sometimes, though rarely, it sleeps next to me. And I, a madman, fold my hands and let it eat its own flesh.
And these events, several of which I have recounted - but I am still recounting them now - I was immediately warned (told everything) about what it was in store for me. The only difference, and it was a large one, was that I was living in proud intimacy with terror; I was too shallow to see the misery and worthlessness of this intimacy, and I did not understand that it would demand something of me that a man cannot give. My only strong point was my silence. Such a great silence seems incredible to me when I think about it, not a virtue, because it in no way occurred to me to talk, but precisely that the silence never said to itself: be careful, there is something here which you owe me an explanation for, the fact that neither my memory, nor my daily life, nor my work, nor my actions, nor my spoken words, nor the words which come from my fingertips, ever alluded directly or indirectly to the thing which my whole person was engrossed in. I cannot understand this reserve, and I who I am now speaking turn bitterly towards those silent days, those silent years, as towards an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, and most of all from myself, yet where I have lived during a large part of my life, without exertion, without desire, by a mystery which astonishes me.
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