The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for
marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers
after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move
its meaning is totaly unknown to us.

				   * * *

	There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain
weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain
intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

				   * * *


	But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the
greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and
chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of
necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only
chance speaks to us We read its message much as gypsies read the images
made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

				   * * *

	But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was
clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life!  Was it
simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for
love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?

				   * * *

	He recalled the noisy music at dinner and said to himself, ``Noise
has one advantage. It drowns out words.'' And suddenly he realized that
all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct
sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words
were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they
turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand;  prowling through his brain, tearing
at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for
at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was a unbounded music,
absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, the futility, the
vanity of words.

				   * * *
	Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its
attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect,
human kind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental
that all others stem from it.

				   * * *

	There is no means of testing which decision is better, because
there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without
warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the
first rehearsal for life is life itself?  That is why life is always a
sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline
of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our
life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

                                   * * *