I���m going to write a few lines to you, by which I mean accomplish my first act as a solid living being, because I���ve already accomplished numerous acts as a living being: I���ve cried, for instance, and tears are as far as possible from death. But it is you I write to first because I want you to able to maintain within yourself, perhaps for a little while longer, the wondrous feeling of having saved a man. I say ���a while longer��� because to the same degree that the one saved holds eternally before him the image of the saviour, the saviour has the tendency to see the image of his act grow indistinct and even to render common the subject he tore from evil.

Thus, my dear Dionys, we are in some sense now completely separate. Our consciences respectively no longer weigh the same. There will always be some indiscretion in my eyes, in my words. You will try not to see it.

I���d like to tell you other things on this subject that seem important to me but I���m aware that I run a fairly grave danger. Dionys, I think I no longer know what is said and what is not said. In Hell, one says everything and it must be for this that we recognise it. For my part, it is certainly in this way that it was revealed to me. In our world, on the contrary, we are accustomed to choosing, and I believe I no longer know how to choose. Well, in what represented Hell for me and others, saying everything was where I lived my paradise. For you must know this, Dionys, that during the first days that I was in my bed and spoke to you, to you and to Marguerite first of all, I was not a man of this earth. I stressed this fact that haunts me retrospectively. To have been able to give freedom to words that were barely formed and had no years, no age, but took shape in relation to my breath. This you see ��� this happiness ��� wounded me definitively and, at this moment, I who believed myself so far from death by some affliction ��� typhus, fever and so forth ��� could think of dying only from this very happiness. And now I have begun again to give a form to things; at least, my spirit and my body try to.

But, I repeat, I think I can no longer choose. In what I am saying there are surely tremendous vulgarities and what you call in your laughter ���an incredible tyranny���. So, am I going to have to reclassify myself; whittle myself down so that one sees only once again a smooth envelope? You���ll tell me that my language is ill-fitting and that the best oil is one that reveals a thousand rough points without ceasing to be oil. In reality, I believe that the problem I am posing is nonetheless a moral one. I have the feeling, which perhaps not all of my comrades have, of being a new being. Not in Wells��� sense of the word ��� in the fantastic sense ��� but on the contrary in the most hidden sense, so that my true sickness, which began so tenderly, just a few weeks ago now, and at that time it was still bearable, now reaches its maturity and becomes very intractable.

Here is an appendage that grows; a spirit without channels or compartments. A freedom perhaps ready to grasp itself; perhaps ready to annihilate other freedoms. Either to kill them or, better, to embrace them. So, if one wanted to see a man take form, one might observe me up close, taking into account the morbid character of the formative process.

Forgive me for insisting ��� it must be unbearable for you who go on to hear someone speak of his original indeterminacy. I think there is even something boorish in all this, and then you would be right be right in answering that in a few months I will have ceased being reborn; that I too will get on and no doubt even along that abandoned path that I left a year ago. You will tell me this, Dionys, or not; you���ll think it, or not. Depending on whether you will or will not have some faith in man. You are certainly one of the few beings in whom I fear fatigue; I mean, despair. There are many who I have loved a great deal and whose despair left me indifferent. By which I mean, a kind of definitive state. I left them in this state, or I revelled and struggled to bring them back. For you, Dionys, whose despair must constantly mix with joy, flights and unfathomable pauses, I could not bear that this despair fix itself and become established. I told you I was not afraid and that such was my sole fear. If you laugh, if you tease me in saying you have never seen so much future, I will tell you that I recognised in myself the right to have this fear.

I stopped there because my hand was hurting.

June 1945

Robert Antelme, writing to Dionys Mascolo, transcribed by Steve Mitchelmore, and paragraphed by me.