Sublime

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up”; and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments.

ignoble,

On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature.

The fear of that little man wouldn’t leave me. Eventually I fell into a kind of half sleep. In the morning I looked in the mirror, and a whole clump of my hair had turned gray. In that moment, I realized that the public can kill you.

Cette séance effrayante lui a fait passer l’envie de retrouver ses anciens amis. Comme il a bien fait, quinze ans plus tôt, de leur fausser compagnie ! Comme ils lui en veulent de l’avoir fait ! Pendant qu’il se battait pour sa survie sur le front de l’Ouest, ils sont restés à mariner dans leur inconfortable confort, protégés par la chape de plomb

All these traces of his life seemed to seize hold of him and say to him: ‘No, you won’t escape us and be different, you’ll be the same as you were: with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of the happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.’

Édouard à enfoncer dans le crâne de gens simples et sans malice comme son interlocuteur, d’abord que tous ceux qui ont gouverné le pays depuis 1917 étaient des sadiques et des assassins, ensuite qu’ils l’ont conduit à la déroute. « La vérité, se lamente le type, c’est qu’on est un pays du tiers-monde : la Haute-Volta avec des missiles nucléaires » 

It is ironic that I should now be imprisoned in this temple, but if it is true that each man in this life builds his own prison, and inhabits it the way crawling fish inhabit shells along the beach at Caesarea, then I have built for myself an exquisite jail, exactly suited to the kind of man I have always wanted to be.