am i changing too fast, my friend? too fast to your taste? or are you the one who’s moving too slow? could it be possible—let the horror be mine!—that i don’t even see you grow! have i overlapped you too many a time? can you still listen to me now? do you still hear my steps as i ascend the stair? (could it too be possible, that you are not even on the same stair as me anymore!) whither you’ve gone, my friend? are you tired of climbing this stair which is without intermediary? are you tired of having nothing to cling on to—no rails, no walls—but your own voice, whenever the pebbles slipped your feet off its balance? are you tired of having no place to rest but on the dissolving steps alone? are you frightened of the fact that you too might dissolve? are you tired of seeing the lights ahead flickered, yet, as we approach them, too quickly they fade? are you tired of being limp again and again, discouraged, nullified, after seeing over and over that instead of it, a mirror is what we always see at the end? and to see that the lights too are nothing but the lights of our mirrored reflections!—lights flashing from our eyes, withering and dying as soon as we question them. . . . are you sick of being petrified? to not only have to stare at the gorgon’s eyes, but to the void behind them? then ascend faster, my friend! depechez-vous! for as the lights get more brighter and the mirrors thicker, so does our wings that, passing them by, crushes them! ever more brighter! thicker! ascend faster then, now! let the clamors from below beguile you not! or could it be that, on the contrary, i hear you descending? horror! whither have the voice left you? is the sight up here so unbearable that you would rather go back? is the silence so deafening? the loneliness so embarrassing? could their shrieks of jubilation from down below allure you so? but listen, here, i could hear them no more! they only make a faint sound, no more audible than an atom’s whiz! you only have to ascend faster, look back not, hear back not, lest the spectres try to sing you down! o what is your conscience made of? i once thought of iron; but now it doesn’t seem so—of wood, then? of plastic? of bubbles? of airs? how weak? how gullible? do you expect me to help you grow wings? do you hope me to summon a giant steel beanstalk with a lift in it so that you could climb more easily, more effortlessly? do you want me to reach you down to help you get back on the track again? well, but i cannot! for the steps that i have trodden behind me are now gone; i have stepped the stair too strongly that it cannot but crack and went to pieces. . . . (and could you see the bricks falling? let it rain upon you not! use them, build the stair again from them if need be!) . . . . . . . . . ahead of me now nothing but lights without distance; behind me a yawning abyss in which only old echoes resound; i could go nowhere but up, up, reaching up to my unreachable sarcophagus, to uncover the mummy that i am, that i am yet to be, to transcend the cocoon of self into which i am glued! a slight slackening of will and i too, will fall, as fallingly as the falling bricks. . . . or are you expecting me to do just that—to fall to you—o my friend, my fellow, my brother, my mother, my father, my sister, my spectator, my illusion, my shadow, my universe, my world? though even you too know—that you won’t be able to catch me?