That was when it happened—on a morning like all the others, when nothing, neither my mind nor my body, gave me any clearer warning than usual. I do not claim that the circumstances took me by surprise: they were already there without my going out to meet them. But circumstances are like that. They are shy and indefatigable; they come and go before our doorway, always the same, and it is up to us whether we stretch out our hand to stop these passersby. It was a morning like every other morning, neither more radiant nor more overcast. I was walking in the country down a road lined with trees; everything was silent, as if listening to itself live; my thoughts, I assure you, were no less innocent than the day which was beginning. At least, I cannot recall thoughts that were not innocent; for as soon as they ceased to be innocent, I ceased to take account of them. At that moment when I seemed to distance myself from the force of nature, I am obliged to praise it for being everywhere present in the form of necessity. The fruit falls only in its own time, since its weight has long been pulling it toward the earth: this inner ripening is the only fatality. I can tell you about this only in a very vague way: I was walking; I had no destination; it was not my fault if, on this particular morning, I encountered beauty …

I came home. I do not want to dramatize; you would quickly perceive I had exaggerated the truth. What I felt was not shame, even less remorse; it was, rather, stupor. I had never imagined so much simplicity in what had so terrified me in advance: the facility of sin discouraged repentence. The simplicity that pleasure taught me I was to rediscover much later in great poverty, in grief, in sickness, in death— I mean in the death of others, but I hope one day to rediscover it in my own death. It is our imagination which causes us to dress things up, but things themselves are divinely naked. I went home. My head was spinning a bit; I have never been able to remember how I passed the rest of the day; the quivering of my nerves took a long time to subside. I can only remember going back to my room in the evening, and then the absurd but utterly painless tears which were nothing more than a release. All my life I have confused desire and fear; I no longer felt either one or the other. I do not say that I was happy: I wasn’t sufficiently accustomed to happiness; I was merely stunned to be so little overwhelmed.