Je préfère la vie à la mort, exister à ne pas exister, car je ne suis pas sûr d'être une fois que je n'existerai plus.

Eugène Ionesco, Rhinocéros

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

Eugène Ionesco

Adorable images,

Plaster of Paris

Lilies of the field,

You are not alive, therefore

Pathos will be out of place.

But I have learned

A strange fact about your fate,

And it is this:

After you go out of fashion

Beneath your many fashions,

Or when your elbows and knees

Have been bruised powdery white,

So that you are no good to anybody—

They will take away your gowns,

Your sables and bathing suits,

Leaving exposed before all men

Your inaccessible bellies

And pointless nubilities.

Movers will come by night

And load you all into trucks

And take you away to the Camps,

Where soldiers, or the State Police,

Will use you as targets

For small-arms practice,

Leading me to inquire,

Since pathos is out of place,

What it is that they are practicing.

To the Mannequins / November 1961

by Howard Nemerov (1920–1991)