Читать книгу One, None and a Hundred-thousand - Luigi Pirandello - Страница 11

Table of Contents

Then, nothing: this. And perhaps you think it is nothing! Following is an initial list of the ruinous reflections and terrible conclusions resulting from the innocent, momentary pleasure that Dida, my wife, had permitted herself. I mean, her calling my attention to the fact that my nose hung down lower on the right side.

REFLECTIONS:

1. That I was not to others what up to then I had believed that I was to myself;

2. That I could not see myself living;

3. That, not being able to see myself living, I remained a stranger to myself, that is, one whom others believed they saw and knew, each after his own fashion, but not I;

4. That it was impossible to stand this stranger up in front of me, in order to see and know him. I could see myself, but could no longer see him;

5. That my body, if I regarded it from without, was like an apparition from a dream, a thing that did not know how to live, but which remained waiting there for someone to take it;

6. That, just as I took this my body, to be from time to time what I wished or felt myself to be, so another similarly might take it, to confer upon it a reality of his own;

7. That, finally, this body in itself was so near to being nothing and nobody that a draught of air might cause it to sneeze today and tomorrow might carry it off.

CONCLUSIONS:

These two for the time being:

1. I was beginning to understand at last why it was my wife, Dida, called me Gengè;

2. I made up my mind to find out who I was, at least to those closest to me, acquaintances so-called, and to amuse myself by maliciously decomposing the I that I was to them.