Whenever we feel like criticizing anyone, we remember that all the people in this world haven’t kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow. You who were with us in the ships at Mylae! We’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way. In consequence, we’re inclined to connect nothing with nothing, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to us and also made us the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to the pills we took, to bring it off, and so, weialala leia, we are privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of these confidences are you! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable – mon frère!
Frequently we have played a game of chess, pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when we realized by twit twit twit jug jug jug jug jug jug that an intimate revelation was done: and we’re glad it’s over; for the intimate revelations of young men are usually plagiaristic and marred by these fragments we have shored against our ruins. Under the firelight, under the brush, our hair is a matter of infinite hope. We are still a little afraid of the one-eyed merchant, and this card, which is blank, is something he carries on his back, which we are forbidden to see, as our parents snobbishly suggested, and we snobbishly repeat, a sense of nothing again nothing parceled out unequally at birth.
We didn’t mince our words, we said to him, our selves an unbroken series of successful gestures. Then there is something gorgeous about fear in a handful of dust, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if we, looking into the heart of light, the silence, are one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
This responsiveness has nothing to do with falling towers, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London, dignified under the name of the third who walks always beside you — it is, rather, an extraordinary gift for the awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract, a romantic readiness such as you, a broken Coriolanus, will never find in any caresses which are still unreproved, if undesired, and which it is not likely you shall ever find again.
O you who turn the wheel and look windward, shantih shantih shantih.
In other words:
