Friday 27 February 2009

Immense expanse - We'll catch our death.

It seemed to her that the turning earth had simply stopped, and that from now on no one would grow old or die. Everywhere, henceforth, life was suspended, except in her heart, where at that very moment someone was weeping with pain and wonder. She vaguely recognized reaching her through the murmur of the idle crowd. Behind her eyelids motionless camels grazed; vast solitude wheeled within her.

A nameless anguish invaded her. Her heart was in pain, she was suffocation under an immense weight which she suddenly discovered she had been dragging around for twenty years.

A faint wind had risen, in which she heard the gentle waters of the palm groves. It was coming from the south, where the desert and the night mingled now beneath the newly still sky, where life stopped, where no one grew old or died.

The cold, no longer needing to struggle against the sun, had invaded the night, the icy air burned her lungs. Lurked herself into the night.

But she ran, half blind, in the darkness. But the cold air she swallowed in gulps soon flowed steadily inside her, and a spark of warmth began to glow amidst her shivers. Her eyes opened at last on the spaces of the night.

No breath, no sound, I am waiting, the cold, the cold. Only makes me treble. The long winter, the glacial wind, the snow drifts.

--Camus

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