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also death, and you’re about to give me back what I loaned you. You great lascivious man, the voluptuosity of nothingness awaits you.”
    When that word, “nothingness,” echoed like a thunderclap in that huge valley, it was like the last sound that would reach my ears. I seemed to feel my own sudden decomposition. Then I faced her with pleading eyes and asked for a few more years.
    “You miserable little minute!” she exclaimed. “What do you want a few more instants of life for? To devour and be devoured afterward? Haven’t you had enough spectacle and struggle? You’ve had more than enough of what I presented you with that’s the least base or the least painful: the dawn of day, the melancholy of afternoon, the stillness of night, the aspects of the land, sleep, which when all’s said and done is the greatest benefit my hands can give. What more do you want, you sublime idiot?”
    “Just to live, that’s all I ask of you. Who put this love of life in my heart if not you? And since I love life why must you hurt yourself by killing me?”
    “Because I no longer need you. The minute that passes doesn’t matter to time, only the minute that’s coming. The minute that’s coming is strong, merry, it thinks it carries eternity in itself and it carries death, and it perishes just like the other one, but time carries on. Selfishness,you say? Yes, selfishness, I have no other law. Selfishness, preservation. The jaguar kills the calf because the jaguar’s reasoning is that it must live, and if the calf is tender, so much the better: that’s the universal law. Come up and have a look.”
    Saying that, she carried me up to the top of a mountain. I cast my eyes down one of the slopes and for a long time, in the distance, through the mist I contemplated a strange and singular thing. Just imagine, reader, a reduction of the centuries and a parade of all of them, all races, all passions, the tumult of empires, the war of appetites and hates, the reciprocal destruction of creatures and things. Such was that spectacle, a harsh and curious spectacle. The history of man and the earth had an intensity in that way that neither science nor imagination could give it, because science is slower and imagination is vaguer, while what I was seeing there was the living condensation of all ages. In order to describe it one would have to make a lightning bolt stand still. The centuries were filing by in a maelstrom and yet, because the eyes of delirium are different, I saw everything that was passing before me—torments and delights—from that thing called glory to the other one called misery, and I saw love multiplying misery and I saw misery intensifying weakness. Along came greed that devours, wrath that inflames, envy that drools, and the hoe and the pen, damp with sweat and ambition, hunger, vanity, melancholy, wealth, love, and all of them shaking man like a rattle until they destroyed him like a rag. They were different forms of an illness that sometimes gnaws at the entrails, sometimes at thoughts, and in its Harlequin costume eternally stalks the human species. Pain relents sometimes, but it gives way to indifference, which is a dreamless sleep, or to pleasure, which is a bastard pain. Then man, whipped and rebellious, ran ahead of the fatality of things after a nebulous and dodging figure made of remnants, one remnant of the impalpable, another of the improbable, another of the invisible, all sewn together with a precarious stitch by the needle of imagination. And that figure—nothing less than the chimera of happiness—either runs away from him perpetually or lets itself be caught by the hem, and man would clutch it to his breast, and then she would laugh, mockingly, and disappear like an illusion.
    As I contemplated such calamity I was unable to hold back a cry of anguish that Nature or Pandora heard without protest or laughter. And, I don’t know by what law of cerebral upset, I was the one who started to laugh—an