Often enough the surface and illusion catch me, their prey, and I feel like a man. Then I’m happy to be in the world, and my life is transparent. I float. And it gives me pleasure to get my pay-cheque and go home. I feel the weather without seeing it, and there’s some organic sensation that pleases me. If I contemplate, I don’t think. On these days I’m particularly fond of gardens.

There’s something strange and pathetic in the very substance of public gardens that I’m only really aware of when I’m not very aware of myself. A garden is a synopsis of civilization – an anonymous modification of nature. There are plants there, but also streets – yes, streets. Trees grow, but there are benches beneath their shade. On the broad walkways facing the four sides of the city, the benches are larger and are almost always occupied.

I don’t mind seeing flowers in orderly rows, but I hate the public use of flowers. If the rows of flowers were in closed parks, if the trees shaded feudal retreats, if the benches were vacant, then my useless contemplation of gardens could console me. But gardens in cities, useful as well as ordered, are for me like cages, in which the coloured spontaneities of the trees and flowers have only enough room to have one, space enough not to escape, and beauty all alone, without the life that belongs to beauty.

But there are days when this is the landscape that belongs to me, and I enter it like an actor in a tragicomedy. On these days I’m in error, but at least in a certain way I’m happier. When I’m distracted, I start imagining that I really have a house or home to return to. When I forget, I become a normal man, reserved for some purpose, and I brush down another suit and read the newspaper from front to back.

But the illusion never lasts long, partly because it doesn’t last and partly because night arrives. And the colours of the flowers, the shade of the trees, the geometry of streets and flower beds – it all fades and shrinks. Above this error in which I feel like a man, the enormous stage setting of stars suddenly appears, as if daylight had been a curtain hiding it from view. And then my eyes forget the amorphous audience, and I wait for the first performers with the excitement of a child at the circus.

I’m liberated and lost.

I feel. I shiver with fever. I’m I.