Today, my dear mother, I am too tired to write to you. You will find in my heart a letter spanning several pages, filled with silence. Read it slowly, you who from now on can read everything. The light of this day has written it in my name. It speaks only of you and me, of this rest that comes to me each time I turn my thoughts toward your idea - over there, up there, everywhere in the air that I breathe.
You would have turned seventy-one. We have so very little time in life: a year lasts like a smile, ten years pass like a shadow, and from so little time there remains only one chance, only one grace : to anticipate our death in the lightness of a smile, in the wandering of a word.
The most interesting moments of my life are undoubtedly the most miserable ones: those in which an illness or a failure, riding into the chapel of my heart on horseback, shatters the chandelier of wisdoms and, with a single sword stroke, disfigures the beautiful ideas hanging on the wall. I then see what remains intact, forgotten by those barbarian women who have passed through my life. The goblet of an ancient dream. The gospel of a smile, the trust of a cloud. The beautiful hat of our conquests will roll across our tomb, but our defeats had already opened the door to eternity for us.
I have found the most secret and clearest name to express what your life is within my life: air. You are the air that never fails me, this air so essential to thought and to laughter, this air that refreshes my heart and turns my solitude into a place swept by all the winds -a second of non-illusory rest, of non-deceptive eternity. You have gone. It was not betrayal. It was following the same path within yourself, simple in its detours that led you to the very end of yourself. You took with you a few flakes of red snow. They float beneath my eyelids when I close them to fall asleep, right there: between the eye and the dream.