91—B2795—New World Writing—7 on 9.5 Times Roman 21

N.A.L.

January 13

Harlow

But even lost they will have their place, in the inventory of my
possessions. But I am easy in my mind, I shall not lose them.
Nor my crutches, I shall not lose my crutches either. But I shall
perhaps one day throw them away. I must have been on the
top, or on the slopes, of some considerable eminence, for other-
wise how could I have seen, so far away, so near at hand, so
far beneath, so many things, fixed and moving. But what was an
eminence doing in this land with hardly a ripple? And I, what
was I doing there, and why come? These are things that we
shall try and discover. But these are things we must not take
seriously. There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature
and freaks are common. And I am perhaps confusing several
different occasions, and different times, deep down, and deep
down is my dwelling, oh not deepest down, somewhere between
the mud and the scum. And perhaps it was A one day at one
place, then B another at another, then a third the rock and I,
and so on for the other components, the cows, the sky, the sea,
the mountains. I can't believe it. No, I will not lie, I can easily
conceive it. No matter, no matter, let us go on, as if all arose
from one and the same weariness, on and on hoarding, until
there is no room, no light, for anymore. What is certain is that
the man with the stick did not pass by again that night, because
I would have heard him, if he had. I don't say I would have
seen him, I say I would have heard him. I sleep little and that
little in the daytime. Oh not systematically, in my life without
end I have dabbled with every kind of sleep, but at the time now
coming back to me I took my doze in the daytime and, what is
more, in the morning. Let me hear nothing of the moon, in my
night there is no moon, and if it happens that I speak of the
stars it's inadvertently. Now of all the noises that night not one
was of those heavy uncertain steps, or of that club with which
he sometimes smote the earth until it quaked. How agreeable it
is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacilla-
tion, in one's first impressions. Perhaps that is what tempers
the pangs of death. Not that I was so conclusively, I mean con-
firmed, in my first impressions with regard to—wait—C. For
the wagons and carts which a little before dawn went thunder-
ing by, on their way to market with fruit, eggs, butter, and per-
haps cheese, in one of these perhaps he would have been found,
overcome by fatigue or by discouragement, perhaps even dead.
Or he might have gone back to the town by another way too
far away for me to hear its sounds, or by little paths through
the fields, crushing the silent grass, pounding the silent ground.
And so at last I came out of that distant night, divided between
the murmurs of my little world, its dutiful confusions, and those
so different (so different?) of all that between two suns abides
and passes away.