I have served you, I have idolized you.
I have never deceived myself. I knew perfectly that in loving a child
one gives without ever receiving. I have reserved the highest place for
others. It is not to you that I have dedicated the essential thing in my
life, its supreme reason, if a supreme reason can be found.

"Therefore you have the right to leave me. You must be finer, you must
repudiate me. I bow before what you are. I free you from the duty in
which children are cooped up, and I assume the duty myself. Whatever I
may have done, never let my course of life be an example to you; there
is no example; you, nothing but you, is what will count.

"You will have so much to do, everything I have failed to do. Go, keep
your face set forward, never turn back. What were you born for if not to
depart from me? To be sure, you are flesh of my flesh, but a part of my
flesh that is unlike me, a contrary current that has emanated from
me.... You say no to everything I am.

"Does it hurt me to see you disappear? Am I alarmed? Do I suffer? That
does not concern you. _I was forewarned_. On the day you were born I was
told that the tearing-away process would last as long as I last. We
leave each other each minute. Your head mounts upward towards the
heavens, mine draws closer to the earth.

"It is right and proper that this should be so. Without you, you know,
my existence would be justified. It was not merely to bring you into the
world that I was born. The thing is that your existence should be
justified.... No, do not delay. Life is nothing but a departure and
every time one halts one commits treason.

"I shall have to come to understand many things, thanks to you. I have
always tried to be clear and know myself, but when I went to the bottom
of things, I mean to the bottom of myself, there always remained
_another_ soul, a rebellious soul which refused to reveal its mystery,
and I have doubted whether it is humanly possible to learn the truth of
it.

"I was not mistaken. The real, unknown part of myself, my unreachable
soul, is in your eyes. You will see through what I have got no knowledge
of. If you beheld how I look at you! You are like the travellers who
come from afar, from the lands of fable concealed under lovely names of
gold. You resemble those travellers. Your eyes will see beyond the
horizon in which I go astray. I tell you that of the two of us the one
who ought to kneel, listen, and learn is not you.

"My lit