The Vengeance of Rome

FORTY-ONE

What would make me so lonely, here among friends, where Mrs Cornelius herself sees me almost every day, is always available to me? What makes a man forever alone? What determines his fate? All that is mine, my faith, my memory, my hope, should invigorate me, make me one with the world. Instead, I feel like one who stands in line, shuffling forward every few minutes, to his death. I, who have escaped every transport, every selection, who have escaped death so many times, fear it. As retribution? No, for I shall ascend to heaven, to that divine moment of forgetting when soul and mind take separate turnings and identity dissolves.

What is restored to us in death? It cannot be anything but truth. It can only be the ultimate moment of knowing. Or is it the first moment of not knowing, of the death of self, the end of this witless struggling?

I leave my life and my inventions to anyone who can put them to good use. The rest I leave to Portobello Road and the secondhand trade, for recycling, to comfort strangers and the unborn.