...of that behind all things

Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain-drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world he had designed. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a cautious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music. A series of deep pulsing vibrations arose from the heart of darkness, out of flatness and obscurity, and then through him, through his conscious body, they became movement, throbbing, powerful movement, measuring time. They mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earth’s crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street-lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations. The void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the substance of the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went on growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers, gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its patterns on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistible feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there, for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceive the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare, skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tunes that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch infinity; to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you the actions you perform, the song of all that is, that’s triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephemeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]