Image of emptiness before emptiness.

    What if the book were only infinite memory of

a word lacking?

    Thus absence speaks to absence.

    "My past pleads for me," he said. "But my fu-

ture remains evasive about the assortment in its

basket."

    Imagine a day without a day behind it, a night

without a previous night.

    Imagine Nothing and something in the middle

of Nothing.

    What if you were told this tiny something was

you?

   And God created Adam.

   He created him a man, depriving him of memory.

   Man without childhood, without past.

   (Without tears, without laughter or smiles.)

   Man come out of Nothing, unable even to claim a por-

   Did God consider for a moment that with one stroke He

deprived this man of what He would in the future grant all

other creatures?

    Adam, son of Nothing by the will of God, fruit of wan-

    fruit ripe before ripening, tree in full leaf before growing,

world completed before emerging from nothing, but only in

    Man of strange thoughts on which, however, his life de-

    Man chained to the Void, chained to the absence of all

    The past reassures us. Man without such security, deliv-

ered to whom? to what?

    Man without light or shadow, without origin or road,

without place, unless part of that place outside time which

is indifferent to man.

    Things must feel this way. But no doubt even they have

their thing-memory, recalling wood and steel, clay or marble.

Recalling their slow progress toward the idea, the know-

ledge of the thing they were to embody.

    O emptiness! Nothing to lean against, nothing to rest on,

    Time molds us. Without past there is no present, and the

I cannot be imagined.

    Orphaned in the fullest sense of the term, of father and

mother, but also of himself - are we not engendered in that

moment of carnal and spiritual experience? - what could

seeing and hearing be for him? What could speaking or act-

ing mean? What weight has a word, what reverberations in

the future? What could it profit him? What contentment,

    Discoveries, encounters, surprises, disappointments,

proaches, in reply to which inner question, lacking all com-

parison?

    The key lies in the fertilized egg, the ovule, the fetus.

    The mystery and the miracle.

    Fertile forgetfulness. It pushes us to sound soul and spirit

in the name of spirit and soul. It helps us clear the various

paths of consciousness, to learn and unlearn, to take what

is offered, whether by dawn or by night, daily, in short, to

    I am not. All I have ever been is the man life has allowed

me to be.

    Thus I exist, molded by the best and the worst, by all I

have loved or fled, acquired or lost, molded by seconds at

the mercy of seconds as life drains away.

    Eve came out of Adam's sleep, woke next to him by the

child, not having seen her body grow and develop, felt her

mind open out, giving full rein to voluptuous sexual desires

or fighting them.

    They looked at each other without a word. What could

they say? They could only observe, only study their differ-

ence.

    Days of boredom, of uneasiness followed. Of anxiety,

too.

    They were God's playthings. Living together, yet unable

to get anything from each other. Living, yet without land-

marks of existence, not even a picture, a portrait which

would bear out that they were real.

    Only an unfamiliar body and a mind unable to think.

    Enter the serpent. Enter into their ears the blandishing

voice of the reptile, which was perhaps only the urgent

voice of their anxiety.

    Ah, this need to know, which on their part was not just

curiosity, but the hope to be healed. For God had im-

planted suffering in them, the hurt of being. God had made

    What if Eve's sin were really the sin of God which Eve,

for love of Him, took on herself? Both a sin of love and the

mad wish to save herself and save Adam?

    Anxiety had encouraged the act, hastening the coming of

their freedom.

    Breaking God's commandment meant, for one and the

other, finding their humanity.

    Nature taking its revenge, the sin of the flesh will prove

to be only the sin of procreation, of glorifying the seed.

    Ephemeral eternity of what is born.

    Eve and Adam cherished in advance, through the child-

hood they never had, their fragile, future offspring. For

God had already left them to their fate only to be in turn

forsaken by them. Their freedom – O solitude and

wound – issued undeniably from this double desertion.

    But two questions remain.

    Did God know, when He created man, that He could

never make a man of him because he could only become

one by himself?

    Did Eve's weakness later seem a lesson to God, and to

Adam, an essential test leading to their particular conscious-