CHESTNUT TREE
31
those hesitant branches groping blindly about them, I was unable to
seize existence in motion. This idea of transition was still man's crea–
tion, an over-clear idea. All those tiny stirrings were isolated, they
were there for themselves. They overran twigs and branches at every
hand. They whirled about these dry hands, covering them with little
tornadoes. Of course, a movement was not the same thing as a tree.
But it was an absolute, nevertheless. A thing. Whatever met my eyes
was a fullness. The tips of the branches swarmed with existences, with
existences that were being constantly renewed and which were never
born. The existing wind lighted on the tree like a big fly; and the
tree shuddered. But the shudder was not a birth shudder, a transition
from potentiality to act; it was a thing; a thing-shudder flowed into
the tree, took possession of it, shook it, and suddenly abandoned it,
turning round and round when it had gone. Everything was a full–
ness, everything was act, there were no unaccented beats; everything,
even the least perceptible stir, was made of existence. And all those
existents scurrying around the tree came from nowhere and were
going nowhere. All at once they existed, and then, suddenly, they
existed no more: existence is without memory; it retains nothing of
what is gone, not even a recollection. Existence everywhere, infinite
existence, superabundant, always and everywhere; existence-never
limited except by existence.
I sank down on the bench, dazed, numbed by this profusion of
beings without beginnings: everywhere there were unfoldings, flow–
erings; my ears hummed with existence; my very flesh palpitated
and gaped, abandoned itself to the universal bursting of life. It
· was repulsive. "But why," I thought, "why so many existences, since
they are all alike?" Of what use are so many similar trees? So many
existences which had failed and stubbornly started over again, and
again failed- like the clumsy efforts of an insect that has fallen on
its back? (I was one of those efforts.) This abundance gave no im–
pression of generosity, just the opposite. It was joyless, sickly, in its
own way. These trees, these great ungainly bodies-and I began to
laugh because all at once I remembered those mighty springtimes
that are described in books, springtimes full of crackling nois<>.s, ex–
plosions and giant sproutings. And the imbeciles who talk about the
will to power and the struggle for life. Had they never looked at an
animal or a tree? This plane tree with its scaly bark, this half-rotten
oak,-did they want me to regard them as mighty young forces
straining toward the sky? And this root? No doubt I was expected
to see it as a voracious claw, tearing open the earth to wrest from it
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