« It will be difficult to continue this story of mine. I don’t even know if it is a story. It is difficult to call this a story, this constant ... clustering and falling apart ... of elements …
Ludwik! Why Ludwik? Leo more likely, the priest, Venomie maybe, even Lena—but Ludwik! And yet this FACT was hanging, a hanging fact, a Ludwik-like fact was hanging, hitting one on the head, a fact that was big, heavy, hanging down, something like a bull roaming about on the loose, an enormous fact on a pine tree, and with shoes ... […]
Indeed, I was looking at this hanging man just as I had looked in those bushes at the sparrow.
And pam, pam, pam, pam! One, two, three, four! The hanged sparrow, the hanging stick, the strangled-hanged cat, Ludwik hanged. How neatly it fit together! What consistency! A stupid corpse was becoming a logical corpse—though the logic was both heavy-handed ... and too much my own ... personal ... so ... separate ... private.
I had nothing left but to think. I thought. In spite of everything I strained to turn it into a readable story and—I thought—what if he were the one who had hanged the sparrow? He drew the arrows, hanged the stick, indulged in these pranks ... some kind of mania, the mania of hanging that led him here, to hang himself ... what a maniac! I remembered Leo telling me when we sat on the tree stump, in all honesty: that he, Leo, had nothing to do with it. So it was Ludwik? Mania, obsession, lunacy …
—Cosmos [Trans. Borchardt]
Cosmos, chapitre X
