I told all this, for the first time, to a little girl; the first time, from beginning to end, in some sort of order. In this way I put it together as a consistent story, one that had, hitherto, always lost itself in a confusion of isolated parts, in a fog of fear, in a sort of extratemporal occurrence. Perhaps it went beyond any defined meaning, like some bad dream that I could neither accept nor reject. And why to her particularly, and why this, is something I can’t explain, even to myself. I felt she might have the ability to listen. For sure, she’d not understand, but, then, listening is more important than understanding.
Experience had taught me that what you can’t explain to yourself is better told to another. You can deceive yourself with just one part of the picture that happens to impose itself with a feeling difficult to express, since it hides in the face of the pain of comprehension and flies into the mists, into the intoxication that seeks no meaning. For the other, exact speech is essential, and this forces you to seek it, to feel its presence somewhere within you, and to grasp it, it or its shadow, so as to recognize it in another’s face, in another’s glance, as he begins to comprehend it. The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word. Or, still more important—if he desires to understand.
He adds: “All unusual, all as it should not be. But I didn’t choose the circumstances, nor they me: We were like two birds in a storm.”