Out on the balcony, the wind will wake me up, the cool wind blowing straight in my face.. Everything has disappeared now; this distance, this ever-receding mass of stars, in that absolute void, in the cold, is no more. No shape; no direction, no center, as when I feel without ceasing to see what I see, the imperceptible, blind movement of what awaits and threatens, quite near, on the other side.. So it is useless to continue the experiment. For his own presence, when he directs his vision on to his hand, the earth, the vague outline of the mountains, seems to him to be surprising enough; the proximity in which he finds himself so improbable - exactly his own reflection enlarged - that he regrets his earlier doubts; quite unafraid, reassured even, since he must now go to sleep; since what he sees must not the seen and, after all, he is resting there, not here, in this unsuitable situation, walking carefully along the rocky mountain path, where occasionally a stone starts rolling down; where he stops, followed by these men, to listen.
Celestial vault endlessly observed, where he will no longer have the time, will no longer be the age to go out walking; nocturnal vault where they will navigate noiselessly and without collisions, as he has done so many times from his bed near the open window (and the lime tree in the garden moved in the wind); as he wished to live, too, plunged in this element, this substance, too heavy, too thick, that has not succeeded, and will not succeed in holding him back. How many voyages by instantaneous trajectory, how many places already occupied, reserved in the same way, and the immediate return, without anybody or anything - not even himself perhaps - suspecting anything ... Motionless, without leaving his chair ... Precise and secret repertory of attitudes; circumstances altered by a trivial thought: his arm lying in the sun, his face in the shade; his hand placed one evening on the edge of a well ... Details that he projects in his mind as violently as possible; details that held him back and which now call him on... Anyway, do they not tend to come together, in this place that eludes and overtakes him; an illusory construction that despite itself he can only vaguely substantiate? Is he not walking among them now, without seeing them? Is he not, at each step, an obstacle to their existence? Himself a false collection of their hidden multitude? Observing in the dark, starry sky, he recomposes the following fictional elements: carnivorous flowers, multicolored canals of the planets; interstellar silences; giant rainbows; fabulous animals doomed in advance; strange diseases that can always be cured (like those explorers lost in ice-bound territory who, without food, gradually waste away, but can be saved a the last moment by fruit). And if some fellow-traveler came to a sudden end (blown up, submerged), one communicated with his new form by means of a system of individually controlled screens: the position of the stars; all points of view; the enumeration of universal thought in terms of concrete elements (numerical fragmentations provided by an arithmetical table) and, in a general way, any imaginable spectacle whatsoever. Then ever onwards, without interruption or going back, the voyage continued.
(Le Parc, 1961, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith)
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