Farewell is the hand that greets, the face hidden by the angry words, is the last sentence before the end of the world. Farewell is the disappearance and, at the same time, the discrete force that disrupts it. It is what wants to keep the words inexhaustible, never finished. All life is a constellation of Farewells: love with its storms and its end, departures full of melancholy, the tears hidden, the lips clenched in the moved silence and, again, the slow and burning end of our loved ones. But every Farewell is a pain and a tremor that never come to exhaust and saturate the time, perhaps because they are always marked by a choreography of gestures, impulses, words punctuated by silence, rebukes, exaggerations and descriptions, promises that speak of a future that is no longer here.

Thus, as the hand that draws on paper always has its own exact and secret formula, even the Farewell has a beginning that trains it and an end that shakes it, like a gift or an invention that belongs to the dancer: “That everything happens”, this is the formula of Farewell.

“The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung. Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine to my feet. The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now.

“His dinner is ready. Won’t he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?”
“Lives without dining,” said I, and closed his eyes.
“Eh!—He’s asleep, aint he?”

“With kings and counselors,” murmured I.

(H. Melville – Bartleby the scrivener – A story of Wall Street)