He climbed-the stairs. He was anxious to get back to his writing, and he was happy at the thought that his novel, at least, wasn't going to be the slightest bit edifying. He still had no exact idea of what he was going to do; the only assignment he had set himself was to enjoy himself fully in being sincere. He spread his notes in front of him — almost a hundred pages. It was good to have put them away for a month; now he would be able to reread them with a fresh eye. He plunged into them joyfully, happy to rediscover memories and impressions formed into careful and smooth-flowing sentences. But after a while he began to worry. What was he going to do with all this stuff? These scribblings had neither head nor tail, even though they did have something in common — a certain feeling, a climate, the climate of the pre-war era. And that suddenly bothered him. He had thought vaguely, 'I shall try to give the flavour of my life.' As if such a thing were a perfume, labelled, trade-mark-registered, always the same, year after year. But the things he had to say about travelling, for example, were all in terms of a young man of twenty-five, the young man he had been in 1935; they had nothing at all to do with what he had experienced in Portugal. The story of his affair with Paula was equally dated; neither Lambert, not Vincent, nor any of the boys he knew would have any similar reactions today. And besides, with five years of living under the German occupation behind her, a young woman of twenty-seven would be very different from Paula. There was one solution: deliberately to place the book around 1935. But he had no desire to write a 'period' novel recreating a world that no longer was.. On the contrary, what he had hoped for in jotting down those lines was to throw himself life and whole on to paper. Well then, he would have to write the story in the present, transposing the characters and events. Transpose — what an annoying word! what a stupid word!' he said to himself. 'It's preposterous, the liberties one takes with the characters in a novel. They're transported from one century to the next, pulled out of one country and pushed into another, the present of one person is glued to the past of a second. And all of it is larded with personal fantasies. If you look closely enough, every character in a novel is a monster, and all art consists in preventing the reader from looking too closely. All right then, let's not transpose. Let's make up characters out of whole cloth, characters who have nothing at all in common with Paula, with Louis, with myself. I've done it before. Only this time it was the truth about my own experiences that I wanted to tell...' He pushed aside the stack of notes. Yes, it was a bad idea, this setting things down haphazardly. The best way was to proceed as usual, to begin with an outline, with a precise purpose. 'But what purpose? What truth do I want to express? My truth. But what does that really mean?' He looked dully at the blank page. 'It's frightening, plunging into empty space with nothing to clutch at. Maybe I have nothing more to say,' he thought. But instead it seemed to him that he had never really said anything at all. He had everything to say, like everyone else, always. But everything is too much. He remembered an old couplet painted on a plate: 'We enter, we cry, and that is life; we cry, we leave, and that is death.' What more was there to add? 'We all live on the same planet, we are born from a womb, and one day we'll serve to fatten worms. Yes, we all have the same story. Why then should I consider it mine alone and decide that it's up to me to tell it?' He yawned; he had had too little sleep, and that blank page made him feel dizzy. He was sunk in apathy. You can't write anything apathetically; you've got to climb back to the surface of life where the moments and individuals count, individually. [...]