Here a thought occurred to me. If that world is only my own, why should I tell about it in these records? Why should I recount all these absurd “dreams” about closets, endless corridors? With great sorrow I notice that instead of a correct and strictly mathematical poem in honor of the United State, I am writing a fantastic novel. Oh! if only it were a novel and not my actual life, full of X’s, square-roots of minus one and down-fallings! Yet all may be for the best. Probably you, my unknown readers, are children still as compared with us. We are brought up by the United State; consequently we have
reached the highest summits attainable by man. And you, being children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.
The Same Evening
Are you familiar with the following sensation? You are in an aero and you dash upward along a blue spiral line; the window is open and the wind rushes past your face, whistling. There is no earth. The earth is forgotten. The earth is as far from you as Venus, Saturn or Jupiter. That is how I live now. A hurricane wind beats into my face; I forget the earth, forget rosy, dear O-90. Yet the earth does exist and sooner or later I must plane down to that earth; only I close my eyes to avoid seeing the date at which there is the name O-90 written on my Tables.
This evening the distant earth reminded me of itself. In order to fulfill the recommendation of the doctor (I desire sincerely, most sincerely I desire to be cured), I wandered for two hours and eight minutes over the straight lines of the deserted avenues. Everybody was in the auditoriums, in accordance with the Table. Only I, cut off from the rest, I was alone. Strictly speaking, it was a very unnatural situation. Imagine a finger cut off from the whole, from the hand; a separate human finger, somewhat hunched, running over the glass sidewalk. I was such a finger.
What seemed most strange and unnatural was that the finger had no desire to be with its hand, with its fellows. I want either to be alone or with her; to transfuse my whole being into hers through a contact with her shoulder or through our interwoven fingers.
I came home as the sun was setting. The pink dust of evening was covering the glass of the walls, the golden peak of the Accumulating Tower, the voices and smiles of the Numbers. Is it not strange: the passing rays of the evening sun fall to the earth at the same angle as the awakening rays of the morning, yet they make everything seem so different; the pink tinge is different. At sunset it is so quiet, somewhat melancholy; at sunrise it is resounding, boisterous.
In the hall downstairs when I entered, I saw U-, the controller. She took a letter from the heaps of envelopes covered with pink dust and handed it to me. I repeat: she is a very respectable woman and I am sure she has only the very best feelings towards me.... Yet, every time I see those cheeks hanging down, which look like the gills of a fish, I....
Holding out her dry hand with the letter, U- sighed. But that sigh only very slightly moved in me the curtains which separate me from the rest of the world. I was completely projected upon the envelope which trembled in my hand. I had no doubt but that it was a letter from I-330.