to-morrow evening, I with my
tremendous memory. Whatever may happen, whatever tragedies may be
reserved for me in the future, my thought will not be graver or more
important when I shall have lived my life with all its weight.

But my whole body is one pain. I cannot stand on my legs any more. I
stagger. I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill with smarting
tears. I want to be crucified on the wall, but I cannot. My body
becomes heavier and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My flesh is
enraged against me.

I hear voices through the wall. The next room vibrates with a distant
sound, a mist of sound which scarcely comes through the wall.

I shall not be able to listen any more, or look into the room, or hear
anything distinctly. And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I
cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry
over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have
embraced.

Here they will pass again, day after day, year after year, all the
prisoners of rooms will pass with their kind of eternity. In the
twilight when everything fades, they will sit down near the light, in
the room full of haloes. They will drag themselves to the window's
void. Their mouths will join and they will grow tender. They will
exchange a first or a last useless glance. They will open their arms,
they will caress each other. They will love life and be afraid to
disappear. Here below they will seek a perfect union of hearts. Up
above they will seek everlastingness among the shades and a God in the
clouds.

. . . . .

The monotonous murmur of voices comes through the wall steadily, but I
do not catch what is being said. I am like anybody else in a room.

I am lost, just as I was the evening I came here when I took possession
of this room used by people who had disappeared and died--before this
great change of light took place in my destiny.

Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps because of my lofty pain, I
imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one
is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his
entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh,
gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it
would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus
because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.

There is no paradise except that which we create in the g