I climb on to Chestnut Hill. No one is there, because it is Sunday. In that white winding-sheet, that widespread pallor of Sunday, all my former lot builds itself again, house by house.
I look outwards from the top of the hill. All is the same in the lines and the tones. The spectacle of yesterday and that of to-day are as identical as two picture postcards. I see my house—the roof, and three-quarters of the front. I feel a pleasant thrill. I feel that I love this corner of the earth, but especially my house.
What, is everything the same? Is there nothing new, nothing? Is the only changed thing the man that I am, walking too slowly in clothes too big, the man grown old and leaning on a stick?
The landscape is barren in the inextricable simplicity of the daylight. I do not know why I was expecting revelations. In vain my gaze wanders everywhere, to infinity.
But a darkening of storm fills and agitates the sky, and suddenly clothes the morning with a look of evening. The crowd which I see yonder along the avenue, under cover of the great twilight which goes by with its invisible harmony, profoundly draws my attention.
All those shadows which are shelling themselves out along the road are very tiny, they are separated from one another, they are of the same stature. From a distance one sees how much one man resembles another. And it is true that a man is like a man. The one is not of a different species from the other. It is a certainty which I am bringing forward—the only one; and the truth is simple, for what I believe I see with my eyes.
The equality of all these human spots that appear in the somber gleams of storm, why—it is a revelation! It is a beginning of distinct order in Chaos. How comes it that I have never seen what is so visible, how comes it that I never perceived that obvious thing—that a man and another man are the same thing, everywhere and always? I rejoice that I have seen it as if my destiny were to shed a little light on us and on our road.
* * * * * *
The bells are summoning our eyes to the church. It is surrounded by scaffolding, and a long swarm of people are gliding towards it, grouping round it, going in.
The earth and the sky—but I do not see God. I see everywhere, everywhere, God's absence. My gaze goes through space and returns, forsaken. And I have never seen Him, and He is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.