There was an old man on the train, the kind of person you don't notice. He was cleaning his glasses slowly and this gesture reminded him how old he had become. When he was a child he never cleaned his glasses. So when his father noticed, he would exclaim: "Clean your glasses, they look like zinc tiles!"
He realized much later that his father was comparing his glasses to the dirty canopy of an airplane cockpit. The old man wondered if that expression was still used today.
When he was younger he felt the need to do a lot of things. Now it was more pleasant to take the time to do nothing but contemplate the moment, the moment that will last forever. He was able to do this as a child, when the notion of time was foreign to him.
Time, today, was dissolving in his gesture, which was like a caress. He was polishing his glasses and his soul. A banal and insignificant gesture for everyone. He put the same application, the same contemplation, when he smoked his pipe or drank a glass of cognac. Knowing that this cognac had the same taste as that tasted by François 1er provoked in him an unspeakable form of satisfaction. But an even greater voluptuous pleasure came over him when he was dozing on the train. To be thus between wakefulness and wakefulness was like dreaming while remaining conscious, or even the opposite. He told himself that eternity was finally easily accessible if he used his senses skilfully. Now he was even certain that this was one of the doors that led to immortality. Not a movie immortality but just the awareness of being part of a whole.
He opened his book again. He had undertaken to read "A la recherche du temps perdu" even though he was trying to escape its grip. He was reading with the awareness of his finitude and non-finiteness. He was like a tightrope walker, a bit like all the wise men that nobody notices. Today he was able to concentrate on the present. But for a long time he had been playing a part, a role. Sometimes he had dreamed of other lives, with a twinge of sadness. Then he decided to follow the advice of Oscar Wilde who said: "Be yourself, all the others are already taken". That was a long time ago now.
The sun was low on the horizon. The train was approaching the station. In a few minutes his silhouette would fade into oblivion, leaving behind an empty seat on the train.
