It’s not the cracked walls of my rented room,
nor the shabby desks in the office where I work,
nor the poverty of the same old downtown streets in between,
which I’ve crossed and recrossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of
the irreparable—none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life.
The poor man possesses an empire,
the great man a field.
I,
however,
lose myself without any joy—not like the river
owing into the sea for which it was secretly born
but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide,
its stranded water never returning to
the ocean but merely sinking into the sand.
One day,
I don’t know which,
I found myself in this world,
having lived unfeelingly from the time I was evidently born until then.
I fell,
with every sunset,
against my hopes and certainties.
Whereas I don’t have the least curiosity about facts,
whatever they are or will yet be.
I’m riding on a tram and,
as usual,
am closely observing all the details of the people around me.
And what’s more horrifying is that I felt,
at the same time,
like myself.
—That’s also a possibility.
Each of us is an entire community,
an entire neighbourhood of the great Mystery,
and we should at least make sure that
the life of our neighbourhood is distinctive and elegant
that the feasts of our sensations are genteel and restrained,
and that the banquets of our thoughts are decorous and dignied.
It often happens that I don’t know myself,
which is typical in those who know themselves.