CHESTNUT TREE
33
Bouville. I was no longer in Bouville, nor anywhere, I
was
floating.
I was not surprised; I was very well aware that it was the World,
the naked World which had suddenly shown itself, and I was choking
with rage against tlus huge absurd being. I could not even
ask
myself
where it all came from, nor how it came about that a world; rather
than nothing, existed. It made no sense; the world was present every–
where, in front and behind. There had been nothing
before
it. Noth–
ing. There had never been a time when it might not have existed.
That was what irritated me: of course there was
no reason
why this
insidious larva should exist. It was impossible to think about it: in
order to imagine oblivion, one had already to be here, in the world,
alive and with his eyes wide open; oblivion was nothing but an idea
in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this oblivion
had not come
before
existence, it was an existence, like any other,
and had appeared after many others. I cried out: "What a filthy
mess, what a mess!" and I shock myself to throw off the sticky slime
but it clung to me and there was so much of it, tons and tons of
existence, endless tons: I was suffocating under the weight of a tre–
mendous ennui. Then, all of a sudden, the park emptied itself, as if
through a big hole; the world disappeared in the same way
it
had
come, or perhaps I woke up. In any event, I saw it no longer; there
was still some yellow earth alongside me out of which a few dead
branches pointed into space.
I got up to go. When I reached the gate, I turned around. The
park looked inviting. I leaned against the gate and looked about me
closely. The pleasant aspect of the trees, the laurel grove, had a mean–
ing; that was the true secret of existence. I remembered that one
Sunday, only about three weeks before, I had already detected a cer–
tain
air
of conspiracy about things. Was it me they were speaking to?
It annoyed me to feel!. had no way of knowing. No way whatsoever.
Still, there it was, waiting; it resembled a glance.
It
was there, on the
trunk of the chestnut tree ... it
was
the chestnut tree: things, etc.,
or maybe they were thoughts, which had stopped on their way, for–
gotten themselves, forgotten what they had wanted to think and had
remained just as they were, wavering, with a strange little twist of
meaning that transcended them. That little meaning annoyed me:
I
could
not understand it, not even if I had stayed there leaning
against the iron gate for a thousand years; I had learned
all
that I
could about existence. I left, returned to the hotel, and wrote down
what you read here.
(Translated from the French by Frances A. Lippman)
