Why in this time?

I could still have flowed on and become fixed a little later, at least in another form, a little later … You think it would have been the same, right? Well, yes, sooner or later … But I would have been someone else a little later. Who knows who and who knows how! Trapped in another fate. I would have seen other things or, perhaps, the same things but with different appearances, arranged differently.

You can’t imagine what hatred the things I see arouse in me, the things caught with me in the trap of this time that is mine. All the things that end up dying with me, a little at a time! Both hatred and pity! But more hatred, perhaps, than pity.

Yes, it’s true, if I had fallen into the trap a little later, I would then have hated that other form as I now hate this one. I would have hated that other time as I do this one now, and all the illusions of life that we the dead of all time fabricate for ourselves with that small amount of movement and heat that remains shut up within us and that comes from that continuous flux that is true life and that never stops.

We are so many busy corpses who are deceiving ourselves into believing that we are creating our lives.

We copulate, a dead man with a dead woman, and we think we are giving life but we give death … Another being in the trap!

‘Here, my dear, here. Begin to die, dear … Begin to die … You’re crying, eh? You’re crying and wriggling about … You would have liked to flow on some more? Relax, my dear! What can you do about it? Caught, co-ag-u-la-ted, fixed … It won’t last but a short while! Relax …’

Oh, as long as we’re very young, as long as our body is fresh and grows and weighs little, we do not clearly realize that we are caught in the trap! But then the body becomes a tangled mass and we begin to feel its weight. We begin to feel that we can no longer move as we did before.

With disgust I see my spirit struggling in this trap to avoid, it too, being fixed in a body already worn out by the years and grown heavy. I immediately drive away every idea that might become stale in me. I immediately interrupt every act that might become a habit in me. I don’t want responsibilities, I don’t want tender attachments and I don’t want my spirit to harden into a crust of concepts either. But I feel that from day to day my body finds it ever more difficult to follow my restless spirit. It continually slumps. It has tired knees and heavy hands … It wants rest! I’ll give it that.

No, no, I’m unwilling and unable to resign myself to offering, me too, the miserable spectacle given by all those old people who end up dying slowly. No. But first … I don’t know what, but I’d like to do something enormous, something unheard of, to give vent to this rage that’s devouring me.