Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 547

But I can see from this latest trick of memory how much more arbitrary and influential it is than the will.

While my memory holds with relentless tenacity, as I cannot too often stress, to my wrongs, when it comes to my shames, it gestures and jokes and toys with chronology like a prestidigitator in the hope of distracting me from them.

Just as I was about to enlarge upon my discovery of the underside of the leaf of love, memory, displeased at being asked to yield its unsavory secrets, dashed ahead of me, calling back over its shoulder: `` Skip it.

Cut it out ''.

But I will not skip it or cut it out.

It is not my intention in this narrative to picture myself as a helpless victim moored to the rock of experience and left to the buffetings of chance.

If to be innocent is to be helpless, then I had been -- as are we all -- helpless at the start.

But the time came when I was no longer innocent and therefore no longer helpless.

Helpless in that sense I can never be again.

However, I confess my hope that I will be innocent again, not with a pristine, accidental innocence, but rather with an innocence achieved by the slow cutting away of the flesh to reach the bone.