1969

I remember. I had gone out in the garden after having watched the eagle landing on the small black-and-white familial screen. The night was cool and speckled with billions of stars. Impossible to distinguish each and every one of them. You had to try to embrace all of them in one look. I heard the voices in the television coming from the inside through the window of the living room. From the back of the garden where the night was darker and entered in the woods the crickets were seemingly calling out to me. At one time, I thought I heard something – or someone. I tried to pierce the darkness of the woods to see what it was but to no avail. Nonetheless, I felt a diffuse fear – fear of the dark, fear of the unknown of a presence in this darkness. I couldn’t hear the television any more at that moment whereas the crickets sang louder still; I only heard their pervasive, repetitive and enticing song. I felt the presence getting closer, looking at me, spying on me from under the woods. I stepped forward then, I believe. And, during a very short, evasive moment, full of vertigo, I saw myself through the eyes of the intruder from under the woods. I saw myself on the garden lawn, under the starry vault. When I came back inside, I was no longer the same man. I became a man this night. Today, many years after, I am no longer the same man. And yet – yet, I keep this undying memory as if I were still that man, that young man who, on a summer night nearly forty years ago, went out in the garden to watch the stars still filled with wonder by the spectacle he had witnessed – the spectacle of four men walking on a dry rock.