““An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not open them, he flung them into the fire in order to escape the assault of memory. We cannot sustain communion with ourself and our thoughts if we allow ghosts to appear, to prevail. The desert signifies not so much a new life as the death of the past: at last we have escaped our own history. In society, no less than in the Thebaid, the letters we write, and those we receive, testify to the fact that we are in chains, that we have broken none of the bonds, that we are merely slaves and deserve to be so.””
