Book: The age of maturity

“So this is freedom?” Daniel acted, he can no longer go back: it must seem strange to him to feel behind him an unreasonable act, which he himself almost does not understand and which will turn his life upside down. And I do everything for nothing; you might think that the result of my actions will be stolen from me; everything happens as if I can always start over. I don't know what I would give to do something irreparable.

He suddenly wanted to talk to Marcel: only to her alone could he tell about his life, his fears, his hopes. But he remembered that he would never see her again, and his unsatisfied, unnamed desire slowly turned into despair. He was alone.

Even if he allows himself to be carried away by circumstances, confused, desperate, like an old sack of coal being carried away, he will choose his own death: he is free, free for everything, free to fool around or act like an automaton, free to agree, free to refuse, free to resort to evasions; marry, leave, drag this load for years, chained to his leg: he could do what he wanted, no one had the right to advise him. Good and Evil existed for him only if he invented them for himself. Objects were grouped around him, they waited, without giving a sign, without giving the slightest indication. He was alone in the midst of monstrous silence, beyond help and justification, condemned to decide once and for all without the possibility of appeal, doomed to remain free until the end.

To be myself is the only freedom left to me.

Maybe the only way to save your youth is not to forget it?

And to nothing.

- Sparkles like a small diamond!
- What sparkles like a small diamond?
- This is a moment. It's round, it's suspended in the void like a little diamond, I'll never die.

He saw Ivish, she was dancing with her head thrown back, she looked somehow lost, without age and future: "She has no shell." She danced, she was drunk and didn't think about Mathieu. Absolutely. As if he never existed. … "She will never be mine, never enter my shell."

They have life. Everyone has. Everyone has their own. These lives stretch through the walls of the ballroom, through the streets of Paris, they intersect, intersect and remain as strictly individual, like a toothbrush, like a razor, like non-borrowed toilet articles. I knew that everyone has their own life. But I didn't know that I had it too. I thought: I am inactive, I will not succumb to the outside. And well, I was losing myself inside.

Maybe you can’t do otherwise, maybe you need to choose: either be nothing, or play what you are. It would be terrible, he said to himself, you have to be a hypocrite by nature.

Of course, Mathieu understood very well that he was a lost man; but here, in the dance hall, at this table, among people as lost as he was, none of this mattered much and was not at all painful.

She fascinated him: he was devoured by a gentle fire, he no longer knew whether he was evil or kind. Good and Evil, their Good and his Evil were one and the same. There was this woman, there was this repulsive and dizzying community.

Evil, like a bicycle, was stable only with increasing speed.

Anger is an extraordinary sensation of speed, you suddenly separate from yourself and fly forward like an arrow: speed grabs you by the scruff of the neck, it increases every minute, it is sweet and unbearable, you roll with the brakes released into an open grave, you sweep away weak obstacles that suddenly arise on both sides .