The thing which was waiting was on alert, it pounced on me, it flows through me. I'm filled with it. It's nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me.

I exist. I hadn't the right to exist. I appeared by chance, I exited like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times, I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing… I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently.

There is bubbling water in my throat, it caresses me- and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me. My thought is me: that's why I can't stop.

I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire. I am. I am. I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I … because … ugh! I flee. I exist, that's all.

And that trouble is so vague, so metaphysical that I am ashamed of it. I was just thinking … that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing absolutely no reason for existing. I realized that there was no halfway house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance.

If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as a necessity.

To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe that there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability, which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift.

All is free, this park, this city, and myself. Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all. They did not want to exist; only they could not help it.

It was impossible for them not to exist. Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. Existence is what I am afraid of. To do something is to create existence - and there is quite enough existence as it is.

An existent can never justify the existence of another existent. Now when I say "I," it seems hollow to me. I can't manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists... Consciousness forgotten, forsaken between these walls, under this grey sky.

And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. There is knowledge of the consciousness. It sees through itself, peaceful and empty between the walls, freed from the man who inhabited it; monstrous because empty. And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word.

At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note.

That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. Behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.