In a portfolio which I still treasure, full of idle drawings made during
some of my semi-artistic excursions to the city of Toledo, are written
three dates.
The events whose memory these figures keep are up to a certain point
insignificant.
Nevertheless, by recollecting them I have entertained myself on certain
wakeful nights in shaping a novel more or less sentimental or sombre, in
proportion as my imagination found itself more or less exalted, and
disposed toward the humorous or tragic view of life.
If on the morning following one of these darkling, delirious reveries, I
had tried to write out the extraordinary episodes of the impossible
fictions which I invented before my eyelids utterly closed, these
romances, whose dim dénouement finally floats undetermined on that sea
between waking and sleep, would assuredly form a book of preposterous
inconsistencies but original and peradventure interesting.
This is not what I am attempting now. These light--one might almost say
impalpable--fantasies are in a sense like butterflies which cannot be
caught in the hands without there being left between the fingers the
golden dust of their wings.
I am going to confine myself, then, to the brief narration of three
events which are wont to serve as headings for the chapters of my
dream-novels; the three isolated points which I am accustomed to connect
in my mind by a series of ideas like a shining thread; the three themes,
in short, upon which I play thousands on thousands of variations,
amounting to what might be called absurd symphonies of the imagination.