generation. Probably the gulf between your generation and mine is not so
deep, but when I look carefully I do not find that you are the profound
motive.

Nothing holds out the promise that in the future we can really give each
other a single day. When I look at you, I am astonished that I gave you
life--it is such a miracle to have caused a creature to live. I am at
the verge of the space separating us. I do not find you there. I go my
way, you go your opposite way, and though there be nothing impossible in
the world, our mutual understanding is impossible. I shall never attain
to your height.

You were born to contradict, since you must surpass, the palpitating
question that I am, my acts, their purpose. You, whom I carried in my
womb nine months, will never be anything but a stranger in my wet eyes
and to the kisses of my lips, a stranger who departs with my blood in
his veins.

You have come. But I did not sink into the fatal pit that engulfs
mothers, the inevitable snare. It's so hard to resist the weak little
thing which can't talk. How can you be expected to resist? A woman
eclipses herself for the sake of the child she brings into the world,
and at the first cry, the mother is in danger. It is the mother we
should try to save. There's no need to be afraid that the
mother-instinct will cool off. The earth will cool off sooner!

To have children. Love is born with them, but love is not enough. And to
try with all your might to fulfill your own destiny. And misfortune if
the children fall behind!

Sleep, my little one....

* * * * *

I have opened the window; the night breathes upon my face. In the wide
outdoors, where the darkness is naked and the freshness is blue, the
expanse opens out like a river. Below, the clustered houses--a sombre
vegetation, a confused, winking mass, a starry profundity, vast and
chaotic, with no boundary lines between city and sky.

My eyes look tranquilly upon the black future piled up at my feet. My
eyes are no longer restless, because now I know for all time what the
future holds. I know that soon I shall be tired and go to sleep, and
when I wake up in the white daylight my son will put his arms round my
neck so prettily. I will smile, then the time for parting will come. The
hidden days contain the unknown.... But forever and ever it will be
suffering.

The future is not a question you ask; it is the suffering that awaits
you. Suffering is th