The dawn! The dawn, I repeated. Henry thought it was the dawn itself which was a...

The dawn! The dawn, I repeated. Henry thought it was the dawn itself which was a new experience. I could not explain what I felt. It was the first time I had not felt the compulsion to escape; it was the first time I had abandoned myself to fraternity, exchange, confessions, without feeling suddenly the need to take flight. All night I had stayed there, without experiencing that abrupt end to fusion, that sudden and painful consciousness of separation, of reaching ultimately and always the need of my own world, the inability to remain outside, estranged, at some moment or other, from everyone. This had not happened, this dawn had come as the first break in the compulsion and tyranny of inadaptation. {The way I once concealed from myself this drama of perpetual divorce was to blame the clock. It was time to go, in place of now I must go, because relationship is so difficult for me, so strained, so laborious, its continuance, its flow.} I never knew what happened. At a party, at a visit, at a play, a film, came a moment of anguish. I cannot sustain the role, the pretense that I am at one with others, synchronized. Where was the exit? Flight. The imperative need of flight. Was it the failure to remove the obstacles, the walls, the barriers, the effort? Dawn had come quietly, and found me sitting at ease with Henry and Fred, and it was the dawn of freedom from a nameless enemy."

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