I wasn’t awake yet, merely on the verge—that is to say, exchanging the immediate for the mediate, exchanging lived reality for words. The more consciously I awoke, the more verbal I became. Images were replaced by vocabulary. What I—my SELF—had been waned. The remaining vacuum filled up with the gruel of the effable. Filled up and became the bit player who, each morning, under my name, tackled the daily existence of a forty-nine-year-old with literary ambitions:

—in the daily betrayal of the genius in us, who is at home in the fable world of dreams: where fish have voices to speak to us, and flowers eyes to look at us, and where we, passionately open like listening children, experience ourselves in inconceivable anxiety and bliss, suffocating because of nameless guilt or fleeing from unnameable threats, rooted in the ground and turned to stone, or lightly floating over smiling lands and domed cities . . . and unamazed, because all wonders are natural here: the immaculate conception is taken for granted, as is the resurrection of the body after death; of all possibilities (which are realities gravid with the miracle of life here), only one never fully comes true: falsehood, because, encapsulated in itself like a glass vessel, it is always transparent as illusion, always appears as itself, simply as falsehood—until, in my awakening, the images are replaced by words, which force us into grammar and thereby back into time: where, in the unceasing decay of the present into the never-again of the past and the not-yet of the future, we become victims of a self-imposed illusion, an abstract reality that we have created and in which we soon yield, even with our souls, to the necessities enjoined upon our bodies—

and thus, pedestrians instead of flyers, girded with cant, hiking boots laced with locutions, and knapsacks full of commonplaces, we march, supposedly rational, towards our lightless destiny—

The night’s poetic expression. But I was soon awake. The reality of October 12th was ready to receive me as though it were the first day of Creation.

I surprised this day when it was still embryonic. The light still had something of the sap-milk of buds. The night had not entirely defoliated; its colors had not yet fully emerged and its contours were only just becoming firm. But day’s capsule was already breaking open. The objects around me celebrated their rebirth into the visible. Over the small, worn carpet in front of the bed, the lightly flowing sunshine of a French autumn day poured more and more amply, insinuating a shadow into the sérail motifs of the pattern, the shadow of an obscenely bent chair leg in Louis Philippe style, the chestnut-brown wood absorbing the rays and letting them blaze up on its embossments.

This, and the tenacious smell of wine, which the sharp air, penetrating through the open window, could not completely drive out from the discolored crimson rep of the curtain, sufficed to place me immediately in the here and now and to conjure up the things around me: the well-worn plush-cushion luxury of the provincial hotel room, the bright street with the two rows of (now leafless) lindens from which the first sounds of car engines would soon come, the cozy old town behind them, laced tighter and tighter in the corset of iron-concrete construction (hence shorter and shorter of breath), the still vast and broadly rolling, now autumnally fire-red wine-grape-land in which it lay. . . and above all this, the hard dome of a sky that grew more and more spiritual the closer I came to Paris—