FILIAL SENTIMENTS OF A PARRICIDE
knowing it can hope for nothing yet unwearingly rebounding with
invincible hopes, the gaiety even, innate and seemingly immortal,
which made such a pleasant companion for sadness, now finally
exhausted, perhaps the one who can see this, in that tardy moment
of lucidity which even lives most bewitched by idle fancies may
have, for even Don Quixote had such a moment, perhaps that one,
like Henri van Blarenberghe when he had dispatched his mother
with a blow of the dagger, would shrink from the horror of his life
and rush for a revolver so that he might die at once. In most men
a vision so painful (supposing that they are able to rise to it) blots out
immediately the slightest rays of the joy of living. But what joy, what
reason for living, what life can withstand this vision? Which, the
vision or the joy of living, is true, which is "the Truth"?
(Translated
by
Barbara Anderson)
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