This, then, is where people come to live; I'd have thought it more of a place to die.
The child was asleep, its mouth hung open, it was breathing in iodoform, pommes frites, fear. That was simply the way it was. The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.
A dog barks. What relief: a dog.
Why should I inform anyone of the changes within me? If I am changing, I no longer remain the person I was, and if I become someone else, it follows that I have no friends or acquaintances. And to write strangers, to people who do not know me, is quite out of the question.
Have I mentioned already that I am learning to see? Yes, I am making a start. I have not made much progress yet, but I mean to the most of my time.
To think, for example, that I have never consciously registered how many faces there are. There are a great number of people, but there are a great many more faces, for every person has several. There are several people who wear the same face for years on end; naturally it shows signs of wear, it gets dirty, it cracks at the creases, it splays out like gloves worn on a journey. These are simple people, practicising economies, and they do not change their face or even have it cleaned. It'll do fine, they insist, and who is to prove then wrong? The question, of course, since they have several faces, is what they do with the others. They keep them for best: their children can wear them some day. But it has been known for their dogs to go out wearing them, too. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people are disconcertingly quick to change their faces, one after another, and they wear them out. At first suppose they have enough to last for ever, but hardly have they reached forty when they come to the last of them. There is of course a tragic side to this. They are not used to looking after their faces; the last is worn out in a week, holed and paper-thing in numerous places, and little by little the underlay shows through, the non-face, and they go about wearing that.
But the woman, that woman: she was wholly immersed withing herself, bowed forward, head in hands. It was at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The moment I saw her, I began to tread softly. The poor should not be disturbed when they are lost in thought. The thing they are trying to think of may yet come to them.
The street was too deserted, its emptiness was wearied with itself and pulled out the footfall from under my feet and banged it about as if it were knocking a wooden clog. The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.
Who cares about a well-made death these days? No one. Even the rich, who could afford to die in well-appointed style, are lowering their standards and growing indifferent; the wish for a death of one's own is becoming ever more infrequent. (skip) along we come and find a life ready to wear on the rail, and all we have to do is put it on. (skip) You die as you happen to die; you die the death that comes with your illness
Is it possible, it thinks, that we have neither seen nor perceived nor said anything real or of any importance yet? Is it possible that we have had thousand of years to look, ponder and record, and that we have let those thousands of years pass like a break at school, when one eats a sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that despite our inventions and progresses, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.
Yes, it is possible.
(skip)
Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is winding down, connected to nothing at all, like a clock in an empty room - ?
Yes, it is possible.
(skip)
Anyone - anyone who has had this disquieting thoughts - (skip) This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself, five flights up, and write, day and night: yes, that is what it will come to - he will have to write.
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. (skip) They give me one look and they know. They know that really I am one of them, and am only play-acting a little. (skip) For it is clear to me that untouchables is what they are, not mere beggars; no, they really are not beggars, one must make distinctions. They are human refuse, the husks of men, spat out by fate. Moist with the spittle of fate, they cling to a wall, a lamp-post, a Morris column, or they dribble slowly down the street, leaving a dark, dirty trail behind them. What on earth did that old woman want of me, who had crept out of some hole carrying a bedside-table drawer with a few buttons and needles rolling about in it? Why did she keep walking at my side, watching me?
(skip) and then I am among these books, beyond your reach as though I were dead, and sit here reading a poet.
There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-covered leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written. I would have written a great deal, for I would have had a great many thoughts and memories of a great many people.
But things turned out differently, (skip) as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.
a viscous tide of humanity flowed towards me. (skip) the laughter oozed from their mouth like pus from open wounds. (skip) I felt I ought to laugh as well but I couldn't. (skip) the truth of it was that they were moving and I never budged an inch.
They don't allow the dying in. (skip) It was his immobility I sensed, and all of sudden I knew what it meant. A link had been forged between us, and I realized that he was rigid with terror. (skip) his withdrawal from everything: not only from humankind. One moment more and all of it would have lost its meaning,
I was one of the untouchables; (skip) a hand that was no longer a hand now lay; (skip) It was some immense, immovable mass, with a face and a large, heavy, inert hand.
Now it was there. Now it was growing from within me like a tumour, like a second head, and it was part of me, though it surely could not be mine, since it was too big.
And with whatever it is that comes back, there rises a whole tangle of muddled memories, clinging to it like wet seaweed on some sunken thing.
the fear that I might betray myself and speak of everything I am afraid of; and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because it is all beyond saying - and the other fears . . . the fears.
I shared the fear with which he sensed them growing and growing, and I saw how he clutched the stick when the spasms began inside him. At those times, the expression of his hands was so severe and relentless that I placed all my hope in his will, which must be a mighty one. But what could the mere will do? The moment must inevitably come when his strength would be exhausted; it could not be a long now. And I, following him with my heart pounding, I gathered what little strength I had, like cash, and, looking at his hands, begged him to take it if he had any need for it.
(skip) Stood. His left hand gently released its grip on the stick and rose, so slowly that I saw it tremble against the air; he pushed his hat back a little and wiped his brow. He turned his head slightly, the water, without taking any of it in, and then he gave in. The stick was gone, he flung wide his arms as if he meant to fly,
(skip) I was drained. Like a blank piece of paper I drifted along, past the houses, back up the boulevard.
if only some of this could be shared. But would it then be, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.
(skip) Your heart is driving you out of yourself, your heart is after you, and you are almost beside yourself and you can't go back. Like a beetle stepped on, you ooze out of yourself, and you little scrap of carapace and adaptability is meaningless.
The trees stood as if they had lost their way in the fog, and there was something presumptuous about driving into it. As we drove, the snow began to fall silently once more, and now it was as if all that remained had been erased and we were driving on to a blank page.
now silence fell. It was as silent as in the aftermath of pain. The silence was strangely palpable and prickling, as if a wound were healing.
That strangely unbounded quality of childhood, the lack of proportions, that refusal of things ever to be quite foreseen, (skip) Essentially this was all still growing apace on me, closing in on every side, and the more I looked out, the more I stirred up what was within me: (skip) It was easy to see that grown-ups were very little troubled by all of this; they went about making their judgements and doing what they did, and, if ever they were in difficulties, it was external circumstances that were to blame.
No matter how often I tried, life gave me to understand that it knew nothing of their existence.
This city is full of people who are slowly slipping down to their level. Most of them resist at first; but then there are those faded, (skip)
Why else do I find it so hard not to follow them when they pass me? Why do I suddenly think up the sweetest words of night, and why does my voice linger, all tenderness between my throat and my heart? Why do I imagine how I would hold them close, right up to my breath, with an inexpressible caution, these dolls whom life has played with, flinging their arms open wide with every spring that comes, for no purpose whatsoever, till their shoulder joints grow loose? (skip) Stray cats are the only ones that come to them in their rooms at evening, and one down a couple of streets. They walk on past the houses, people continually screen them from my view, and they disappear beyond them as if they were merely nothing.
And yet I know that if a man were to try to love them, they would weigh upon him, like people who have been walking too long and simple stop.
But it is night, it is winter, I am freezing, I believe in him. For glory is a mere moment, and we have never seen anything longer lasing than wretchedness.
Ah, ought you to have been dead?
Maybe. Maybe what is new is that we survive it: the year, and love. The blossoms and the fruit are ripe when they fall; animals are aware of their own being, and find each other, and are content with that. But we, who have embarked on the quest for God, we can never accomplish an ending. We keep postponing what our own nature prompts us to, needing even more time. What is one year to us? What are all the years? Even before we have embarked upon God, we are praying to Him: let us get through this night. And then illness. And then love.
At such times, the light burns late in his study. He does not remain bent over the pages always, but often leans back and closes hi eyes to ponder a line he has reread, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
- 아프도록 유려한 문장이 표현해 낸 존재적 슬픔과 공허, 그리고 공감.
되씹어서 읽어도 역시 아름답고 가슴 저릿한, 문장들 사이에 그의 말대로 등을 기대고 의미가 혈관에 퍼지는 것을 저릿 저릿할 정도로 느끼게 되는 그런 책이다.
무슨 말로 표현할 수 있을까? 비가 개이지 않는 회색 하늘 밑 그림자가 길어지는 날, 이 책을 다시 펼쳐 젖은 눈으로 한동안 허공을 한동안 응시하게 되리라는 것 밖에는...
