Nothing holds out the promise that in the future we can really give each other a single day. When I look at you, I am astonished that I gave you life—it is such a miracle to have caused a creature to live. I am at the verge of the space separating us. I do not find you there. I go my way, you go your opposite way, and though there be nothing impossible in the world, our mutual understanding is impossible. I shall never attain to your height.
You were born to contradict, since you must surpass, the palpitating question that I am, my acts, their purpose. You, whom I carried in my womb nine months, will never be anything but a stranger in my wet eyes and to the kisses of my lips, a stranger who departs with my blood in his veins.
You have come. But I did not sink into the fatal pit that engulfs mothers, the inevitable snare. It's so hard to resist the weak little thing which can't talk. How can you be expected to resist? A woman eclipses herself for the sake of the child she brings into the world, and at the first cry, the mother is in danger. It is the mother we should try to save. There's no need to be afraid that the mother-instinct will cool off. The earth will cool off sooner!
To have children. Love is born with them, but love is not enough. And to try with all your might to fulfill your own destiny. And misfortune if the children fall behind!
Sleep, my little one....
I have opened the window; the night breathes upon my face. In the wide outdoors, where the darkness is naked and the freshness is blue, the expanse opens out like a river. Below, the clustered houses—a sombre vegetation, a confused, winking mass, a starry profundity, vast and chaotic, with no boundary lines between city and sky.
My eyes look tranquilly upon the black future piled up at my feet. My eyes are no longer restless, because now I know for all time what the future holds. I know that soon I shall be tired and go to sleep, and when I wake up in the white daylight my son will put his arms round my neck so prettily. I will smile, then the time for parting will come. The hidden days contain the unknown.... But forever and ever it will be suffering.
The future is not a question you ask; it is the suffering that awaits you. Suffering is the answer to every question, and every instant claws the flesh. If you listen intently, you will hear that the echo of everything is a sob.
It is suffering. Suffering does not find a vent, it does not bleed in any cry, it clings to you, and nothing reveals it because it is omnipresent, so present and so plain that you can't look for or find it. It is not the tears choking your throat, nor the groan at night, nor the knell of a parting footstep, nor the mourning which stifles you, nor the heart in your breast, for that would be too little. When suffering begins with exuberant sunshine and mornings like a flourish of trumpets, it is even more terrible because it is further away.... Suffering is more. It is unlike anything else. It is regular, steady as the breath, amazing, tolerable, and it is not the last word you say, it is also the first word; it follows its mortal, monotonous course, and you realize it has no name: to live is to suffer.