take the backbone out of a man. There is no more initiative. We are
all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces
of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it
doesn't fit at all. It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone;
we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no
one knows why;--but then we don't know either why we live at all; it
is not life, we are just there.

"They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers
took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who
run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in
heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not
so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but
the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It's hard
to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the
way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full
of toads.... People are always doing something to confuse the issue,
nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty. But that trick is
played out. Good enough to die for, but you can't live for things like
that."

"How about the present?" asked Clerambault.

"Now? There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to
begin over again--"

"When did you change your mind about all these things?"

"That was the funniest thing of all. It was as soon as I was wounded.
It was like getting out of bed in the morning. I had hardly slipped a
leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again. I had been so well
off, and never thought of it, ass that I was! I can still see myself,
as I came to. The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than
the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of
jack-straws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding.
It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold,
except that I knew I was hit, all right.... I didn't know exactly what
piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was
afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure
of, that I was alive. If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold
on to it.... There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it
meant, I didn't care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a
bright flower.... I can't tell you how lovely it seemed. I simply
drank it in.... I remembe