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too must have turned down a dead-end alley just like the others. For I notice in myself, not a pile of facts, and instead strive almost tragically to be. It’s a question of survival like eating human flesh when there’s no other food. I struggle not against people who buy and sell apartments and cars and try to get married and have children but I struggle with extreme anxiety for a novelty of spirit. Whenever I feel almost a little illuminated I see that I am having a novelty of spirit.
    My life is a distorted reflection just as the reflection of a face is distorted in an undulating and unstable lake. Trembling imprecision. Like what happens to water when you dip your hand in it. I’m the faintest reflection of erudition. My receptivity is tuned ceaselessly registering other people’s conceptions, reflecting in my mirror the subtle shades of distinctions between the things of life. I who am the result of the true miracle of the instincts. I am a swampy terrain. In me is born a wet moss covering slippery rocks. A swamp with its suffocating intolerably sweet miasmas. A bubbling swamp.
    AUTHOR: Trying to possess Angela is like trying desperately to grab hold of the reflection in the mirror of a rose. Yet all I had to do was turn away from the mirror and I would have the rose itself. But then there enters a chilly fear of owning the strange and delicate reality of a flower.
    ANGELA: As a practically permanent contact with logic a feeling arose in me that I had never felt before: the fear of living, the fear of breathing. I must struggle urgently because this fear ties me down more than the fear of death, it is a crime against myself. I long for my previous atmosphere of adventure and my stimulating restlessness. I think I still haven’t fallen into the monotony of living. I recently started suddenly sighing, deep and prolonged sighs.
    AUTHOR: Angela has an invisible diadem atop her thick hairdo. Sparkling drops of musical notes run down her hair.
    ANGELA: I am extremely tactile. Great aspirations are dangerous, great risk is inherent to great aspirations. Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.
    AUTHOR: Since Angela Pralini is a bit unbalanced I would advise her to avoid the dangerous situations that might break our fragility. I say nothing to Angela because it’s no use asking her to avoid recklessness since she was born to be exposed and go through every kind of experience. Angela suffers a lot but is redeemed in pain. It’s like giving birth: one must pass through the sieve of pain in order to be relieved afterwards seeing before one a new child in the world.
    ANGELA: But something broke in me and left me with a nerve split in two. In the beginning the extremities linked to the cut hurt me so badly that I paled in pain and perplexity. However the split places gradually scarred over. Until coldly, I no longer hurt. I changed, without planning to. I used to look at you from my inside outward and from the inside of you, which because of love, I could guess. After the scarring I started to look at you from the outside in. And also to see myself from the outside in: I had transformed myself into a heap of facts and actions whose only root was in the domain of logic. At first I couldn’t associate me with myself. Where am I? I wondered. And the one who answered was a stranger who told me coldly and categorically: you are yourself. Slowly, as I stopped looking for myself I ended up distracted and without purpose. I’m good at theorizing. I, who empirically live. I dialogue with myself: I expose and wonder what was exposed, I expose and refute, I pose questions to an invisible audience and they spur me on with their replies. When I look at myself from the outside in I am the bark of a tree and not the tree. I didn’t