Annabelle was ill and I did not worry. The world was dying and I did not worry. What would happen would happen anyway. What would happen had happened already. This was not important. What was important was the condition in which I would see what would happen anyway. What was important was what I did. I walked again and my tin cans rattled and I cursed them. I stopped.
Nothing mattered. Once we had had the fact of freedom without searching for the illusion of it, and then we had found the illusion and lost the fact. Now we had neither fact nor illusion. We had lost all powers. We simply had, at every moment, a choice. A choice that was given, to the right or to the left, like in a maze. We were at the centre, and the object was to get out. The maze was there, mankind was there, there was no question of freedom. One walked, and there were a million junctions, and every time one must choose. One did not know if one chose right or wrong, if one went outwards or inwards, it was only true that one went. Freedom was choosing right and death was choosing wrong, but one did not know until the end where one had gone. So it did not matter. Where one goes one would have gone anyway. I walked, and my tin cans tripped me, and I laughed.
Moving thus, alternately walking and stopping, laughing and cursing, in the manner of a man with his feet in a sack, I found myself at the entrance to a large hotel. I went in, so that I could rest, and I observed the world that I hated. Upon the walls and the chairs the upholstery bulged with the fatness of fruit gone rotten in a warehouse; and the people, taking their cue from the decorations, paraded faces like wax apples, clothes like banana skins, buttons and brooches like cloves in a suet pudding. Old men were like slugs, young tufts like caterpillars, and the dried hobbled women like sticks of liquorice. I sat down and watched them. I thought, These are the godless people I have to love, the ugly people who are beautiful. And then I remembered my own trail of garbage, my feet in the sack.
I thought — It is easy to love the horror and the suffering, it is easy to think beautiful the child with cancer and the hangman’s rope, but it is not easy to adore this rottenness. This smell has nothing to do with eternity.
Eternity. If life is a maze and time is a moving staircase then you can run against the moving staircase, that is the easiest thing in the world, you can go back, you can begin again, you can undo what you have done, every action of the present can wipe out consequences of the past and once the consequences have gone then the actions of the past do not exist. You can absolve wrong choices, creating your own absolutions. I am responsible for everything that I have done in the whole of my life, I am responsible for the causes of what I have done and the consequences, I am responsible for the death of Marius’s wife, for the loneliness of Peter, for the pain of Annabelle. If what I have done has been in honour of this responsibility — if the pain is lessened, the loneliness gone, the death made beautiful — then I have created my own absolution. But I have not. The past is around my ankles, my feet in the sack. Whatever I have done my feet are still hobbled. What is time?
I am responsible for not only what has affected me, I am responsible for everything that has happened in every part of the world for ever. Whatever I have done this is what I cannot alter. Whatever I do I cannot move. The maze is around me and I cannot move. What is time?
It is necessary that I move. It is necessary that I get rid of this garbage. It is necessary that I love. And then I thought, What have Annabelle and I to do with time?
What if Annabelle should die?
Thus, in the hall of the great hotel, among the perfumes and the cigars and the odourless flowers, I answered the question. It was necessary that Annabelle should live. If Annabelle died in the night, of her illness, it was still necessary that she should live. The first time that I saw her two years ago, when I talked with her and gave her up, when I held her last night and was terrified, it was absolutely necessary that these moments should live. And they did, that was what love meant, it was irrefutable. Annabelle would live because that is what love meant, and time was eternity.
And if time is eternity then you cannot go back, you cannot undo what you have done, your mistakes are always with you. You can only move by asking for an absolution which is beyond you. Eternity is beyond you, and this is what makes nothing matter and then when you have realized this, it makes everything matter. This is not a paradox. Things are on different planes, the part and the whole, what becomes and what is completed, the maze as you see it from within and the maze as it exists from without. The part on its own does not matter because it is helpless. The whole on its own does not matter because it is finished. What does matter is the relationship between the part and the whole. What is important is what you do in relation to the whole. And this relationship is possible because eternity exists, there is the possibility of apprehending it because what is becoming is part of it. There is to every man, either in the sky or in the heart, or somewhere between them, a reflection of the whole. There is a periscope to eternity. It is possible to outwit the helplessness of the part, to achieve the whole by mirrors. The mirrors have been given.
And then, beginning to walk, you find you can walk freely. When love is honoured there is absolution, when nothing seems to matter it is possible to decide what matters, when there is a glimpse of eternity there is guidance through the maze. At once, in a double stroke, the past is cut loose and a thread is given to the future. You walk, thus, leaving the refuse behind you: you go, step by step, and there are stars to guide you. The stars are there, as light, between the world and eternity. With mirrors you can see them, above the dark walls of the maze. There is everything to be done and all life is a learning: the mirrors of the heart have to be focused to the sky. There are instructions for this, to be read most carefully. I will read them. But now, at the centre, at the beginning, I can walk. Aware of the end, the outside, a step can be taken. It is love that has turned me, the beginning and the end. There are things to be done. And finally, in the hotel, among the scented wreaths dissimulating corpses, I looked round, curiously, for the last time, and thought — All right you goats, be Gods and Goddesses.
I rang up Alice. “How is she?” I said.
“You keep away,” Alice said.
“I know,” I said.
“It was bad enough with that blasted priest.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. But how is Annabelle?”
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “Is her father in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“And her mother?”
“Her mother is away.”
“Has she got any relations beside that blasted brother?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Does she want relations?”
“No,” Alice said. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Thank you, Alice. I really want to thank you.”
“She’s all right,” Alice said.
“She’s sure to be all right. You ring up again in the morning.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Alice, you have been right all the time.”
“In the morning,” Alice said.
Around the grass of the square there had been erected a small wire fence to discourage trespassers. I stepped over it and took my seat beneath the statue. This was a familiar place, as well as being one from which I could intercept Peter. I looked up and saw a light in the window which I thought was Annabelle’s. I prepared for the night.