I have given notice. I am going
away to-morrow evening, I with my tremendous memory.
Whatever may happen, whatever tragedies may be reserved
for me in the future, my thought will not be graver
or more important when I shall have lived my life
with all its weight.
But my whole body is one pain.
I cannot stand on my legs any more. I stagger.
I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill
with smarting tears. I want to be crucified
on the wall, but I cannot. My body becomes heavier
and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My
flesh is enraged against me.
I hear voices through the wall.
The next room vibrates with a distant sound, a mist
of sound which scarcely comes through the wall.
I shall not be able to listen any
more, or look into the room, or hear anything distinctly.
And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry
now like a child because of all that I shall never
have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur.
I love everything that I should have embraced.
Here they will pass again, day after
day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will
pass with their kind of eternity. In the twilight
when everything fades, they will sit down near the
light, in the room full of haloes. They will
drag themselves to the window’s void.
Their mouths will join and they will grow tender.
They will exchange a first or a last useless glance.
They will open their arms, they will caress each
other. They will love life and be afraid to
disappear. Here below they will seek a perfect
union of hearts. Up above they will seek everlastingness
among the shades and a God in the clouds.
The monotonous murmur of voices comes
through the wall steadily, but I do not catch what
is being said. I am like anybody else in a room.
I am lost, just as I was the evening
I came here when I took possession of this room used
by people who had disappeared and died-before
this great change of light took place in my destiny.
Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps
because of my lofty pain, I imagine that some one
there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is
speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from
the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain,
always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from
evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him
as it would steal to its nest. And you feel
that we are all like Prometheus because of desire,
but there is neither vulture nor gods.
There is no paradise except that which
we create in the great tomb of the churches.
There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of
living.
There is no mysterious fire.
I have stolen the truth. I have stolen the
whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic
things, pure things, and I was right. I have
seen shameful things, and I was right. And so
I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving
respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use
the expression that deceit and religious blasphemy
employ.
Who shall compose the Bible of human
desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which
drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings,
our goings, our original fall? Who will dare
to tell everything, who will have the genius to see
everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry,
in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs.
The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more
I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour
with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me,
shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself
have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece.
Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill
of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole
room has quivered with it like a forest, and there
have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried
out.
But I have stolen all this, and I
have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of
the truth revealed. At the point in space in
which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to
open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands
to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost
a work.
What I have seen is going to disappear,
since I shall do nothing with it. I am like
a mother the fruit of whose womb will perish after
it has been born.
What matter? I have heard the
annunciation of whatever finer things are to come.
Through me has passed, without staying me in my course,
the Word which does not lie, and which, said over again,
will satisfy.
But I have finished. I am lying
stretched out, and now that I have ceased to see,
my poor eyes close like a healing wound and a scar
forms over them.
And I seek assuagement for myself.
I! The last cry, as it was the first.
As for me, I have only one recourse,
to remember and to believe. To hold on with
all my strength to the memory of the tragedy of the
Room.
I believe that the only thing which
confronts the heart and the reason is the shadow of
that which the heart and the reason cry for.
I believe that around us there is only one word, the
immense word which takes us out of our solitude, NOTHING.
I believe that this does not signify our nothingness
or our misfortune, but, on the contrary, our realisation
and our deification, since everything is within us.