La Petite Mort

"...that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short where lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here, too, by the way, aren’t we on the water? On this flat, monotonous, interminable water whose limits are indistinguishable from those of the land? Is it credible that we shall ever reach Amsterdam? We shall never get out of this immense holy-water fount. Listen. Don’t you hear the cries of invisible gulls? If they are crying in our direction, to what are they calling us?"

"I prefer my primitivism, my childlike faith, my rural ways, my wild tree soul."

"The day she lives for its night and the night for its miracle."

"And so little do the roads know of her that I’ve come to accept, with flowing tears, that she’s gone to sleep the fabled sleep, a sea without treachery and a peak without slope, no happiness or pain, no more forgetting."

"After that painful night, he only feels resigned. What was done doesn’t provoke any conflict in him. It immerses him in an intense calm that he never knew before, distances him and pacifies him. A dignified sadness, without severity, he no longer feels anything but the sweetness of things, he reaps only memory’s charms."

"I sometimes think now that I’m recovering myself, the way I used to be. I’m all too glad to think about the time when I had everything, when my cheerfulness was truly full of cheer, when I was serious in the good sense of the word. (quasi glissando) Then everything became worse for the wear, damaged, used and used up and ultimately destroyed."

"Even if Malina is silent, it’s better than being silent alone..."

"...because Malina is always there for me, steadfast and composed, and even in the darkest hours I am aware that Malina will never be lost to me — even if I were to get lost myself!"

"I'd drink into myself your melting flesh

"And now they fall.

"They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much. And they had learned that in everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death."