"
If it can utter this sentence, why should it find it difficult or
impossible to add:
"You will find the matches there that will set fire to the
curtains."
What forbids it to do so and closes its mouth at the decisive
moment? We relapse into the everlasting question: if it cannot
complete the second sentence because it would be destroying in
the womb the very event which it is foretelling, why does it
utter the first?
19
But it is well in spite of everything to seek an explanation of
the inexplicable; it is by attacking it on every side, at all
hazards, that we cherish the hope of overcoming it; and we may
therefore say to ourselves that our subconsciousness, when it
warns us of a calamity that is about to fall upon us, knowing all
the future as it does, necessarily knows that the calamity is
already accomplished. As our conscious and unconscious lives
blend in it, it distresses itself and flutters around our
overconfident ignorance. It tries to inform us, through
nervousness, through pity, so as to mitigate the lightning
cruelty of the blow. It speaks all the words that can prepare us
for its coming, define it and identify it; but it is unable to
say those which would prevent it from coming, seeing that it has
come, that it is already present and perhaps past, manifest,
ineffaceable, on another plane than that on which we live, the
only plane which we are capable of perceiving.
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