Discovery of Life
(For Spanish translation click here)

Sirs! Today is the first day I realized the presence of life. Sirs! I request you to let me be free for a moment in order to savor this formidable emotion, spontaneous and fresh with life, that today, for the first time, I am in ecstasy it makes me so happy I cry.

My pleasure comes from my virgin emotion. My explanation comes as before. I did not feel the presence of life. I had never felt it. He who says that he has is lying. He lies and his lie wounds me to such a great degree that I become miserable. My pleasure comes from my faith in this personal encounter of life and no one is able to go against this faith. If this should happen, his tongue should fail, his bones should fail, and he should run the danger of catching others, in order to maintain oneself in front of my eyes.

I have never had life until now. People have never passed until now. There have never been houses nor avenues, air nor horizons, until now. If come now my friend, Peyriet, I should say that I do not know him and that we ought to begin anew. When, in effect, have I known my friend Peyriet? Today should be the first time that we know each other. I should say to him that he should go and return and enter again, seeing me as if he does not know me, that is to say, for the first time.

Now I do not know anyone not anyone. I am acquainted with a strange country, that relieves the birth, light of unwithering epiphany. No, sir. Do not talk to that man. You do not know him and it will surprise you to hear such unbiased gossip. Do not stand up on this little stone, it may not be a stone and may go flowing into the abyss. Be cautious, we are placed in an absolutely unknown world.

How little time I have lived! My birth is so recent that there’s not enough size to count my age. If I’ve just born! If, I have not lived yet! Sirs: I am so tiny that scarcely a day is in me.

Not until now, did I hear the clamor of wagons, carryings stones for the great construction of the Boulevard Haussmann. Not until now, did I advance alongside the spring, saying to it, “If death have been something else . . . ” Not until now, I did see the aurora of light of the sun on the domes of the Sacre-Coeur. Not until now, has a child approached me and looked at me deeply with his mouth. Not until now I knew there existed a door, another door and the cordial song of the distances.

Leave me! Now life has given to me in all my death.