The worse for us if we did! But this buzzing, this perpetual ticking we do notice, and I say that all this furious haste is not natural, all this flickering and vanishing of images; but that there lies beneath it a machine which seems to pursue it, frantically screaming.

Will it break down?

Ah, we must not fix our attention upon it too closely. That would arouse in us an ever-increasing fury, an exasperation which finally we could endure no longer; would drive us mad.

On nothing, on nothing at all now, in this dizzy bustle which sweeps down upon us and overwhelms us, ought we to fix our attention. Take in, rather, moment by moment, this rapid passage of aspects and events, and so on, until we reach the point when for each of us the buzz shall cease.


3

I cannot get out of my mind the man I met a year ago, on the night of my arrival in Rome.

It was in November, a bitterly cold night. I was wandering in search of a modest lodging, not so much for myself, accustomed to spend my nights in the open, on friendly terms with the bats and the stars, as for my portmanteau, which was my sole worldly possession, left behind in the railway cloakroom, when I happened to run into one of my friends from Sassari, of whom I had long lost sight: Simone Pau, a man of singular originality and freedom from prejudice. Hearing of my hapless plight, he proposed that I should come and sleep that night in his hotel. I accepted the invitation, and we set off on foot through the almost deserted streets. On our way, I told him of my many misadventures and of the frail hopes that had brought me to Rome. Every now and then Simone Pau raised his hat-less head, on which the long, sleek, grey hair was parted down the middle in flowing locks, but zigzag, the parting being made with his fingers, for want of a comb. These locks, drawn back behind his ears on either side, gave him a curious, scanty, irregular mane. He expelled a large mouthful of smoke, and stood for a while listening to me, with his huge swollen lips held apart, like those of an ancient comic mask. His crafty, mouselike eyes, sharp as needles, seemed to dart to and fro, as though trapped in his big, rugged, massive face, the face of a savage and unsophisticated peasant. I supposed him to have adopted this attitude, with his mouth open, to laugh at me, at my misfortunes and hopes. But, at a certain point in my recital, I saw him stop in the middle of the street lugubriously lighted by its gas lamps, and heard him say aloud in the silence of the night:

"Excuse me, but what do I know about the mountain, the tree, the sea? The mountain is a mountain because I say: 'That is a mountain.' In other words: 'I am the mountain.' What are we? We are whatever, at any given moment, occupies our attention. I am the mountain, I am the tree, I am the sea. I am also the star, which knows not its own existence!"

I remained speechless. But not for long. I too have, inextricably rooted in the very depths of my being, the same malady as my friend.

A malady which, to my mind, proves in the clearest manner that everything that happens happens probably because the earth was made not so much for mankind as for the animals. Because animals have in themselves by nature only so much as suffices them and is necessary for them to live in the conditions to which they were, each after its own kind, ordained; whereas men have in them a superfluity which constantly and vainly torments them, never making them satisfied with any conditions, and always leaving them uncertain of their destiny. An inexplicable superfluity, which, to afford itself an outlet, creates in nature an artificial world, a world that has a meaning and value for them alone, and yet one with which they themselves cannot ever be content, so that without pause they keep on frantically arranging and rearranging it, like a thing which, having been fashioned by themselves from a need to extend and relieve an activity of which they can see neither the end nor the reason, increases and complicates ever more and more their torments, carrying them farther from the simple conditions laid down by nature for life on this earth, conditions to which only dumb animals know how to remain faithful and obedient.

My friend Simone Pau is convinced in good faith that he is worth a great deal more than a dumb animal, because the animal does not know and is content always to repeat the same action.

I too am convinced that he is of far greater value than an animal, but not for those reasons. Of what benefit is it to a man not to be content with always repeating the same action? Why, those actions that are fundamental and indispensable to life, he too is obliged to perform and to repeat, day after day, like the animals, if he does not wish to die. All the rest, arranged and rearranged continually and frantically, can hardly fail to reveal themselves sooner or later as illusions or vanities, being as they are the fruit of that superfluity, of which we do not see on this earth either the end or the reason. And where did my friend Simone Pau learn that the animal does not know? It knows what is necessary to itself, and does not bother about the rest, because the animal has not in its nature any superfluity. Man, who has a superfluity, and simply because he has it, torments himself with certain problems, destined on earth to remain insoluble. And this is where his superiority lies! Perhaps this torment is a sign and proof (riot, let us hope, an earnest also) of another life beyond this earth; but, things being as they are upon earth, I feel that I am in the right when I say that it was made more for the animals than for men.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is, that on this earth man is destined to fare ill, because he has in him more than is sufficient for him to fare well, that is to say in peace and contentment. And that it is indeed an excess, for life on earth, this element which man has within him (and which makes him a man and not a beast), is proved by the fact that it--this excess--never succeeds in finding rest in anything, nor in deriving contentment from anything here below, so that it seeks and demands elsewhere, beyond the life on earth, the reason and recompense for its torment. So much the worse, then, does man fare, the more he seeks to employ, upon the earth itself, in frantic constructions and complications, his own superfluity.

This I know, I who turn a handle.

As for my friend Simone Pau, the beauty of it is this: that he believes that he has set himself free from all superfluity, reducing all his wants to a minimum, depriving himself of every comfort and living the naked life of a snail. And he does not see that, on the contrary, he, by reducing himself thus, has immersed himself altogether in the superfluity and lives now by nothing else.

That evening, having just come to Rome, I was not yet aware of this. I knew him, I repeat, to be a man of singular originality and freedom from prejudice, but I could never have imagined that his originality and his freedom from prejudice would reach the point that I am about to relate.


4

Coming to the end of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we crossed the bridge. I remember that I gazed almost with a religious awe at the dark rounded mass of Castel Sant' Angelo, high and solemn under the twinkling of the stars.