Je suis seul au milieu de ces voix joyeuses et raisonnables. Tous ces types passent leur temps à s’expliquer, à reconnaître avec bonheur qu’ils sont du même avis. Quelle importance ils attachent, mon Dieu, à penser tous ensemble les mêmes choses.

Estoy solo en medio de estas voces alegres y razonables. Todos estos tipos se pasan el tiempo explicándose, reconociendo con felicidad que comparten las mismas opiniones. ¡Qué importancia conceden, Dios mío, al hecho de pensar todos juntos las mismas cosas!.

All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other.

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt. I fear. I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.

But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can’t we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me.

Oh God, perhaps it really is just me.

Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.

In the pool I lose myself. My thoughts merge and flow. Everything — my body, my heart, the universe — seems tolerable when I’m protected by water and nothing touches me. All I think about is the effort. Below my body there’s a restless play of dark and light projected onto the bottom of the pool, that drifts away like smoke.

Everyone’s alone — or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other,
And I’m sure they don’t. Is that delusion?
Can we only love
Something created in our own imaginations?

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt ; I fear ; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me !

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see

IGNORANCE

I didn’t know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea,where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.

An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.

Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
has disappeared
into the absolute.

I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don’t know anything,
and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance.

I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.