Alexis

ALEXIS

This letter, my dear, will be very long. I am not very fond of writing. I have often read that words falsify thought, but it seems to me that written words falsify it even more: you know how little is left of a text after two successive translations. Then too, I do not know how to go about it. Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords. A letter, even the longest, is obliged to simplify what should not have been simplified: one is always so much less clear the minute one tries to be complete. I should like to make here an effort not only of sincerity but also of precision: hence, these pages will contain many erasures; they do already. What I would ask of you (the only thing that I still can ask of you) is not to skip over any of these lines which will have cost me so much. For if it is difficult to live, it is even more difficult to explain one’s life.

Perhaps it would have been better if I had not gone away without saying anything—as if I were ashamed, or as if you had understood. It would have been better for me to have explained myself quietly, slowly, in the intimacy of our room, at that hour of dusk when one sees so little that one dares admit almost everything. But I know you, my dear. You are a very kind person. In this sort of account, there is something pitiable which can cause the hearer to be moved; and because you would have felt sorry for me, you would have believed you had understood me. I know you. You would have wished to spare me the humiliation of so lengthy an explanation; you would have interrupted me too soon; and I would have been weak enough to hope that I would be interrupted at each phrase. You have another quality as well—a defect perhaps—which I shall speak of presently and which I do not wish to abuse any longer. I am too culpable toward you not to force myself to place a distance between me and your pity.