100% of Famous Dead French Existentialists Surveyed Agree
“I’m not going to kill anyone. I’m going to prevent a child from being born…
It sounded as though there existed somewhere a completed child awaiting the hour to come out into the open, into the sunlight, and Mathieu was barring its passage. And, indeed, that was more or less the fact: there was a tiny human creature, conscious, furtive, deceitful, and pathetic, with a white skin, and wide ears, and tiny birthmarks, and all manner of distinctive signs such as are stamped on passports, a little man who would never run about the streets with one foot on the pavement and the other in the gutter; eyes, green like Mathieu’s or black like Marcelle’s, which would never see the vitreous skies of winter, nor the sea, nor any human face, hands that would never touch the snow, nor the flesh of women, nor the bark of trees: an embodiment of the world, ensanguined, luminous, sullen, passionate, sinister, full of hopes, an image populous with houses and gardens, tall delightful girls, and horrible insects; and a pin would pierce it and explode it like a toy balloon.”
The Age of Reason (translated by Eric Sutton)
