He has run as far as the ivy thicket, thirty yards from my chair. I tremble so that I have to get up and leave my work. Every now and then he comes tottering to present me with a shaving of wood fished up from the sand he plays in, a big earth-coated pebble, treasure-troves of all sorts. "Look, mother." His attention flatters me.
If I were to disappear without leaving anything?... Without leaving a will? Or suppose that from beyond the tomb I were to say: "Before you took your first steps your life was all arranged. In order that you should be happy I kept you from having dignity or a sense of justice. No need for you to undergo the bitter struggle that presses upon a man, the primordial cares of existence, honesty—honor, in short. Are you not my child? If I have taken trouble and pains it was to deprive human beings all for your sake. You will be exempted from earning your bread and pursuing an occupation. You will depend upon the labor of others, you will be under the delusion that you are distinguished from those upon whom you depend. That is the end to which my efforts will have served." But this is wrong, unwholesome, dishonorable.
When he is grown up into a tall young man whom people take notice of, shall I have the courage to look him in the face and say:
"You are not everything to me: you never have been my whole passion. I have cherished you on my knees, I have served you, I have idolized you. I have never deceived myself. I knew perfectly that in loving a child one gives without ever receiving. I have reserved the highest place for others. It is not to you that I have dedicated the essential thing in my life, its supreme reason, if a supreme reason can be found.
"Therefore you have the right to leave me. You must be finer, you must repudiate me. I bow before what you are. I free you from the duty in which children are cooped up, and I assume the duty myself. Whatever I may have done, never let my course of life be an example to you; there is no example; you, nothing but you, is what will count.
"You will have so much to do, everything I have failed to do. Go, keep your face set forward, never turn back. What were you born for if not to depart from me? To be sure, you are flesh of my flesh, but a part of my flesh that is unlike me, a contrary current that has emanated from me.... You say no to everything I am.
"Does it hurt me to see you disappear? Am I alarmed? Do I suffer? That does not concern you. I was forewarned. On the day you were born I was told that the tearing-away process would last as long as I last. We leave each other each minute. Your head mounts upward towards the heavens, mine draws closer to the earth.
"It is right and proper that this should be so. Without you, you know, my existence would be justified. It was not merely to bring you into the world that I was born. The thing is that your existence should be justified.... No, do not delay. Life is nothing but a departure and every time one halts one commits treason.