“Then the hands slowly close behind his back. At last! Ah, at last! Happiness holds him captive, and he buries his head in the mother’s bosom. He squashes his nose right up against her black breasts, he shuts his eyes, and, with a kind of rumbling hangover—heavy, drunken, lost, all of it!—he leaves the world behind, far, far away. . . . And he’s saved! Naked nevermore, alone nevermore, weak nevermore, cold nevermore, all of it nevermore . . . except for drunken happiness. And this is the way the mountains have closed behind us. Nevermore! If we wanted to get out of here now, on every side we’d be risking our lives along walls of ice.

“But the town—did you ever play with building blocks when you were young? All right, the houses are like those blocks that used to amuse you, and they rise from terrace to terrace on the mountainside. There’s a wonderful silence. Once in a while, the black water flowing out of the glaciers forms a little waterfall between two mica rocks; otherwise, you can go for a long time and hear nothing at all. Then, high above, or far below, somebody opens a door to come out and warm themselves in the sun, on a doorstep made of matted grass. And there you have the town! Oh, I know it, because I’ve hungered for it for so long! The men and the women of the whole world have built this town inside themselves, step by step, stone by stone, flower by flower. And they’ve built this living mountain, a mountain that can play the old trick of ‘surprising happiness’ or the game of ‘nevermore.’ But since the whole world is stronger than a Negro woman (who knows, maybe not? it might be better to say: since the desires of the whole world are stronger than a Negro woman), rather than gather us in its arms, it holds us tight with these glaciers, which we can’t even imagine. And it really is ‘nevermore.’ Because everyone knows, by instinct, that happiness is a necessity. Without it, ah! . . . . And we’re so adept at losing it. If it doesn’t make itself inevitable, with the power of an insurmountable peak, we’re forever trying to flee from it . . . like water, through the deepest valleys, the darkest caves, the foulest-smelling badger holes . . . to slide our dead weight down there, to drain away and disappear, effortlessly, down the slope.

“But now, happiness has taken us by surprise. It’s hemmed us in with its wolf-toothed mountains. You know, over the course of thousands and thousands of years of human desires, it’s done things in a peculiar way, but it’s done them well. So much for the heart. The mind, now, the mind is an entirely different matter. The mind talks. The heart, on the other hand, doesn’t say anything. It’s there, in your chest, like a pair of little clogs. And it goes clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop along a road it travels without a word. The mind doesn’t go anywhere. It’s stuck where it is, and it keeps on chattering endlessly. It asks questions.