‘Our immediate concern’, Alberto continued, after the discovery of the stone, was to find the entrance to it. It must have been a slit only just wide enough to let us creep through. But my happiness was at its peak when I could crouch at the back of the tiny cave: I could scarcely fit into it, all my wishes were granted.” In other words, fulfilment, as this child understood it, meant living in a space defined and circumscribed by his mother. This metaphor of the stone, standing forever erect, golden as the summer light, indicates that he thought of this place as the ultimate reality, and that his greatest wish was for a kind of ontological security, what he calls his ‘joy’ which here was realized. But at what a cost; how much had to be given up, and how disturbing for the future! A happiness in which nothing changes, as though any action separates one from it. A paralysis in sufficiency, ominous for the years when the sufficiency easily enjoyed in early youth has to be reinvented in more difficult circumstances and in light of unfamiliar needs.

Bonnefoy, Yves. 2006. Giacometti (Revised Edition). N.p.: Flammarion