So there’s this bedroom where nothing appears to have been touched. — Order? By all means! — But not the usual kind. — Order? By all means! But after the revolution that broke out whilst I was sojourning far away, that triumphed, that, in the meantime, settled in and blocks my view of where it was really heading, what it has achieved, what its point had been. This bedroom had been my atelier, where I’d hack away my wasted days. — But this bedroom was changed, albeit without appearing that anything had been touched. Only now I know, now I know what that unfeelable thing is, that invisible obstruction in the doorframe — it is the cumulative resistance of all the wasted days to come: they’ve mutinied against the hack; they’ll no longer allow themselves to be done up; they won’t be a party to masquerades; they’re resolved not to lie and not to be duped. They will strictly be what they will be. In the doorframe, there stood not future time, but future tense — it leaned on a knotty cane, for it was an old man, and asked not to be a party to my hack masquerades. And that resistance of the future tense had the shape and range of a truly immeasurable silence. Which, once I’d recognized it, drew aside, let me in, and I crossed the threshold.
And I entered chambers that whispered to me that nothing is also something. I was willingly convinced. Then it was as though their immeasurability gradually diminished. Slowly, slowly I came back to myself. I was somewhere that resembled my bedroom, at first nearly, then almost, and finally enough that it set the mind aglow. It was actually that a revolution had gone down here, and that it was hiding what it really wanted. — The whole time there was this great silence, though no longer hermetic; the sound of beingness carried in, as if from a far-off passage. More and more distinct. — And then, as if my millstone had been suddenly removed: I turned my head. I determined that yes, I was in my bedroom. It was different from before, but it was still my bedroom. — A bitter relief rippled through me. I started getting undressed.
I started getting undressed. The day, already departing for tomorrow, returned hastily and somewhat reluctantly, as it does daily, somewhat like a chastened child on his way to bed, who in the confusion forgets that he has to say goodnight. He’s returned, the helpless little cripple, and he’s sobbing into his elbow, “Look what you’ve done to me!” What a wretch! Day after day, the same story: I hear out his grievances, but absently; I argue with him, but without interest; I promise that I’ll do right by him tomorrow, but my mind is elsewhere; I warn him to cut it out, but I warn without passion. Because that’s pretty much it, my mind is elsewhere: on the harbor that awaits me. But where you enter, it seems to me, you don’t sail out from again, so I’m making sure I keep to the buoys that lead the way: straight ahead, sleep. A line of buoys leads me there, they’re quietly swaying on a very black, very languorous surface. The pilot plows through the water, which doesn’t so much as splash. As if he were slithering over it. This pilot is silence. — Today, however, he doesn’t quite want to be. In what silence there is, something is whispering. I listen in, attentive, unriled. It’s nearby — those two over there. The kind of whispering before sleep, the whisper of considerate guests who are afraid of disturbing you. You can hear them removing their clothes: the absent punctuation to their whispering. Not long ago I would offer my hospitality to friends, to couples. We’d spend an evening at the theater. Upon returning we would converse for a short time longer, then I would leave them and go get undressed. Like today. Then, too, one could hear the call of things that had been put off: affable dots, accent marks, and semicolons set my guests’ whispering to music — a whispering in no way mysterious, a whispering that told all. It was having a cozy time in the silent womb of my apartment, in the spacious silence. Here and there a distinct word slipped through the slightly open door, as if to assure me that I had a share even in that which I did not discern. Those words spun out like a rosary, dense at first, then less and less frequent. After which nothing but whispers and the chatty punctuation of things. — I pay close, but cool, attention. Yes, it’s entirely like the other day, after the theater. The friendly idyll before sleep. — What am I saying, like back then? What a fool I am! It is the other day after the theater. Next door are my recent guests. That is, today is not so long ago, what with not so long ago having been today. We came back from the theater. We had a bit of conversation. That before retiring we might hit upon something. That we might find some pretext for falling asleep beneath a baldachin of laughter: we’ll chat — chat like tossing a ball, any which way — so, then, what might we chat about? About the waiter, who got a bit tongue-tied; or how we laughed ourselves silly at the usherette who offered us the programs, displaying them like they were tablets of law; at our gesture of refusal she’d shrugged her shoulders as if regretting that we did not want to submit to the law, and worried that we might thus be risking our salvation. We solemnly vow that tomorrow we will go to such-and-such a place, and we go to sleep bursting with laughter, because we have unwittingly revealed to each other that we don’t think it matters. –
Yes, but it was precisely out of this cheerful laughter that my fear prolapsed. It alerted me that they were cowering here somewhere. It alerted through the sweaty shirt sticking to my back. It was a strange fear: I didn’t have it, but I was aware of it. As if it had appeared to me. I knew that it and I were face-to-face, so close I couldn’t see it. So close it wasn’t there to see. A peculiar fear. Unexcited, reflective, and imploring. Imploring me to shelter it within myself, to take it in. It looked so unhappy, it looked particularly unhappy. One evening — I was quite young at the time — an older man had stopped me on the street, and he said to me: “Take me with you.” I looked at him, one would say, as befit the circumstances, well, with revulsion. He broke into tears: “Take me with you, no one wants to take me with him.” I wasn’t afraid, for I clearly saw that he was suffocating on the tenderness with which everyone was thrusting him away. I was certain that he wouldn’t harm me, that he had nothing to harm me with. . I wasn’t afraid, I say, and yet I was seized by horror, and I know precisely where it had come from: it was the horror of being infected with misfortune. With his misfortune, for this man was unhappy the way others fall ill. I took to my heels, but he came after me, quietly calling, “Don’t be afraid, you big ninny, don’t be afraid of being unhappy.” But I fled, I fled, for unfortunates like these pose a greater threat to us than Jack the Ripper. In like manner was the unsightly and piteous fear that was confronting and courting me here not my own fear, it was beyond me, without my having actually beheld it; and yet I knew it was here, and I feared it as I would someone with an infectious disease: i.e., its horror.