Translation:The Man Who Lost a Button/VIII.
VIII.
[edit]And the man who searched a button began going from house to house.
Some people welcomed him and let him enter their rooms, walk amongst their families, feeling sorry for the still-young man who would never bring harm to anyone. Others, however, made fun of him. They laid out heaps of buttons before him and watched as he examined them. They would, on purpose, lead him into dark cellars, to attics, where buttons rested on a lonely beam. One joker even made him climb onto the roof, to pull a button out of the chimney. They showed him buttons, small and gray, similar to his, but they couldn’t trick him. He would only touch the button and say:
“It’s not it!”
He knew they pitied him or mocked him, but he bore it without anger. He now looked with curiosity into those rooms: into their cabinets and even into the people. He wondered, just as he had once felt wonder when he turned over the stone in the thicket and discovered that whole tiny world. It was happening to him now, just as it had when he searched the fields, the forests, the coastal shallows, and the little river. He was no longer searching only for his button: he was observing people. Getting to know them. And finally, understanding them... It was as if, in front of him ―the madman who searches for his lost button― they took off their masks and showed themselves, as they truly were. Most often he visited the homes of the poor, and sometimes he returned home not even thinking of the button, sad and full of sorrow. Now he knew the little town better than anyone else; he knew every soul in it, just as he knew every blade of grass and every stone in the lands around.
“What is there to fear in a man constantly looking at the sky or searching the wide earth for a button, small and gray?”, the people said, letting him wander among them, hiding nothing from him.
But one day, the man said:
“The thing I search, I will never find among them.”