I sit waiting for a telegram which is to announce to me either a death or a recovery. Time flows by unutilized and holds me in suspense. Time has ceased to be a stream that feeds me, nourishes me, adds growth to me as to a tree. The man that I shall be when the news comes, dwells outside me: he is moving towards me like a ghost about to fuse with me. And for want of knowing who I am, I am suspended in anguish. The bad news, when it comes, puts an end to my suspense. It causes me to suffer, which is not the same thing.

T. never knew whether, in the hour to come, he was to be transmuted into a living man or a dead man. He was aware of only one thing—the flow of time, running like sand through his fingers while he waited for the coming of a certain instant too rich in power for his resistance.

For me, piloting my plane, time has ceased to run sterile through my fingers. Now, finally, I am installed in my function. Time is no longer a thing apart from me. I have stopped projecting myself into the future. I am no longer he who may perhaps dive down the sky in a vortex of flame. The future is no longer a haunting phantom, for from this moment on I shall myself create the future by my own successive acts. I am he who checks the course and holds the compass at 313°. Who controls the revolutions of the propeller and the temperature of the oil. These are healthy and immediate cares. These are household cares, the little duties of the day that take away the sense of growing older. The day becomes a house brilliantly clean, a floor well waxed, oxygen prudently doled out.... Thinking which, I check the oxygen flow, for we have been rising fast and are at twenty-two thousand feet already.

“Oxygen all right, Dutertre? How do you feel?”

“First-rate, Captain.”

“You, gunner! How’s your oxygen?”

“I ... er ... Shipshape, sir,”

“Haven’t you found that pencil yet?”

And I am he who checks his machine guns, putting a finger on button S, on button A.... Which reminds me.

“Gunner! No good-sized town behind you, in your cone of fire?”

“Er ... all clear, sir.”

“Check your guns. Let fly.”

I hear the blast of the guns.

“Work all right?”

“Worked fine, sir.”

“All of them?”

“Er ... yes, sir. All of them.”

I test my own and wonder what becomes of all the bullets that we scatter so heedlessly over our home territory. They never kill anyone. The earth is vast.

Now time is nourishing me with every minute that passes. I am a thing as little the prey of anguish as a ripening fruit.