If I think it good to address this letter to my comrades, it is not because the propositions that it contains concern them. It will probably even appear to them that such propositions do not concern anyone in particular at all. But in this case I need to have at least a few people as witnesses to establish so complete a defection. There are, perhaps, declarations which, for lack of anything better, ridiculously need an Attic chorus, because they suppose, as their effect, in spite of everything, a minimum of astonishment, of misunderstanding, or of repugnance. But one does not address a chorus in order to convince it or rally it, and certainly one does not submit to the judgment of destiny without revolting, when it condemns the speaker to the saddest isolation.
This isolation, as far as I am concerned, is moreover in part voluntary, since I would agree to come out of it only on certain hard-to-meet conditions.
In fact even the gesture of writing, which alone permits one to envisage slightly less conventional human relations, a little less tricky than those of so-called intimate friendships – even this gesture of writing does not leave me with an appreciable hope. I doubt that it is possible to reach the few people for whom this letter is no doubt intended, over the heads of my present comrades.