Night was long in coming; the twilight outlines of things merely dissolved into a more and more formless brightness, the only contour in it being my blue sea bag. “Sea bag on the mountain ridge,” I caught myself mumbling as I was falling asleep. Then I swam for hours in the Arctic Ocean, which froze solid around me. Suddenly I felt fingertips on my face, no contact could have been warmer or more real, and a familiar voice said to me: “My dearest!” But when I opened my eyes in the darkness, no one was there; only a crackling that grew louder and louder, closer and closer; then a crash, but the wild beast proved to be my sea bag, which had tipped over.
I got up before first light and made my way along the ridge, step by step. That’s how I wanted it; I wanted at last, like the barefoot child on the path beside my father at the border between night and day, to pick out every detail signifying the start of day and everything else besides; I wanted at last to repeat the adventure of “existence.” But it didn’t work. In my childhood, the primordial world had imprinted itself on my mind along with the separate drops of early-morning rain, which dug tiny craters in the dust of the path; but now everything was the primordial world — the rain gushing out of the dark sky as it had been falling since the world began, the smoke rising from the black earth as though from clefts in lava, the gray-on-gray of the wet, cold rock, the creepers catching at my feet, the absent wind — thus, nothing could take the form of that pattern in the dust. Perhaps the hand-in-hand-with-my-father was lacking or the closeness to the ground, something the present narrator can sense but not so the child’s successor up there on the mountain ridge; in that case, might it not be possible to renew an experience not so much by imitating or aping it as by retracing and actively reliving it? Instead of the glow rising from the dust craters, as though the sun itself were rising right here on the planet, I perceived nothing on my solitary march but a dismal dawning in which all shapes, even those of the night, dissolved, and no feeling of a sun, however distant, was born; and now, stumbling over rocks and roots in the gray of dawn, freezing and sweating at once, soaked to the skin, my wet, lumpy sea bag growing heavier and heavier on my back, I found myself repeating, not my childhood walks with my father, but my soldier-brother’s plodding through a wasteland into a battle that was lost in advance; instead of a path through fields, a military highway. Though I was sure of going westward, I thought with anger that I was being sent to the east like my brother years ago, and though I was heading exactly for my desired destination, I was plagued by the thought that every step was carrying me farther away from the place that was my one and all. Was the first warning cry of the marmot addressed not to its fellows but to me? Wasn’t the albino-pale mountain hare, darting out of the clouds and passing me by with a squeak, a symbol of catastrophic flight?
Such were my angry, oppressive thoughts, yet nothing could deflect me from my path. At daybreak the rain let up and I started the descent into the still-hidden Isonzo Valley. There was no discernible trail, but I would make one. And, to be sure, I discovered in myself the light-footedness of my father’s speech on the mountain crest, a quick, steady leaping from boulder to boulder, without halt or hesitation. It even gave me pleasure, a pleasure which increased in one place where a bit of rock climbing became necessary. There, Father, I was on all fours, but erect; I felt a simultaneous pull in my fingertips and the balls of my feet, as I never did in the physical labors you gave me to do. I reached the foot of the little wall alive, and plunged into the light of the sun, which actually appeared at that moment.
That brought me to the southern tree line. I still had a long, but easy, hike ahead of me. As I went on, I was overcome with something different from fear of lightning or wild beasts or falling. In telling me about his solitary expeditions as a young geographer, my teacher said that he hadn’t felt free until he left “the last signs of hunters” behind him. I, on the contrary, far from any settlement, in a spot where I could be almost certain that no one else would turn up (and no one knew I was there), fell a prey to anxiety, to fear of a monster — and I myself was the monster. Vanished was every contact with a world; instead, a pallid light, through which, harried by the bloodhound that had suddenly erupted within me, the monster named Alone wandered blindly. And then another jolt, which was at the same time recollection. Had I given myself that jolt, or did it just happen? It happened, and it was I who gave it to my wandering self. Sometimes, as a boy, I had encountered myself in that way, usually on waking, and always at times when I felt threatened. My anxiety turned to terror, as if the end had come, and my terror into a dread with which, reduced to a tumor, I waited — unable to stir a muscle — for the tumor to be removed. But it wasn’t. Instead, an utter stranger appeared and that stranger was I. It was “I,” written with a capital letter, because it wasn’t just anybody; gigantic and space-filling it stood over me, paralyzing my tongue and my limbs; it was my written name. My dread became amazement (to which for once the word “boundless” applied), the evil spirit became a good one, the tumor became a creature, toward which in my imagination, instead of the ominous one finger, a whole kindly hand pointed — and with the appearance of this “I,” it was as though I had just been created: wide-open eyes, ears that were pure listening. (Today, alas, my wonderment at that incomprehensible “total I” refuses to reappear; it seems to have departed from me forever, and this may have something to do with the guilt which has become a part of me at the age of forty-five, and leaves me alone with my often depressing reason, whereas I see my twenty-year-old “I” in a state of grace, in the madness of innocence. Madness? There in the wilderness it was madness that cured me of my fear.)
Reassured, I went my way, with myself on my back, not as a burden, but as protection. I had no sooner reached the forest than I heard a crashing behind me, and a boulder came hurtling between the trees. In the moss a buzzing, as if a swarm of flies had been shooed away from a dung heap — that was a moss-green snake rearing its head and hissing at me. I brought myself to admire it. The skeleton under the pile of brushwood was a roebuck’s; it had horns on its head; I took head and horns with me for a while, then I threw them away. While crossing a pathless clearing covered with chest-high ferns, I took time to listen to the humming of the invisible and otherwise soundless birds in the ferns at my feet. It was not inconsistent with my carefree mood that I was glad to catch sight of an overgrown path, which in descending widened into an old road, and was even happier to see the first fresh wagon tracks and the groove made by the brake claw — it was that steep — in the middle strip of grass. At the sight of this groove, of the clods of mud ripped up by the brake, the oily water in the deep black, glistening wheel ruts, the horseshoe marks, the boot prints of the driver walking beside the wagon (the writing on the soles had left a clear imprint), it even seemed to me that a whole orchestra was starting to play, and this most delicate of all melodies has remained to this day my ideal of music. Then came the first cheeping of sparrows and the barking of dogs. Though it was beginning to rain again, I sat down by the roadside and ate a few blackberries, which here on the southern slope were beginning to ripen. I took off my shoes and let the “sky water” wash my aching feet. I was so hot that the sweat was steaming off me. The shiny handle of my flashlight showed me a face plastered with pine needles. Since the berries failed to quench my thirst, I drank of the warm rainwater as I walked. The elder bush at the entrance to the village was already sprinkled black; next to it, bearing fruit that seemed to grow straight out of its branches, an adventure: my first fig tree. At the foot of the village terrace a desert of white stone, with a bright green stripe twining through it — the So