Certain sensations are slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog and prevent us from thinking, from acting, from clearly and simply being. As if we hadn’t slept, something of our undreamed dreams lingers in us, and the torpor of the new day’s sun warms the stagnant surface of our senses. We’re drunk on not being anything, and our will is a bucket poured out on to the yard by the listless movement of a passing foot.

We look but don’t see. The long street bustling with clothed animals is like a flat-lying signboard whose letters move around and make no sense. The buildings are just buildings. We’re no longer able to give meaning to what we see, though we see perfectly well what’s there.

The banging of the crate-maker’s hammer reverberates close by, yet remotely. Each blow makes a distinctly separate sound, with an echo and without any point. The wagons creak as they do on days when storms threaten. Voices emerge from the air, not from throats. The river in the background is tired.

It’s not tedium that we feel. Nor is it grief. It’s a desire to sleep with another personality, to be able to forget everything with a pay increase. We feel nothing, unless maybe an automatism down below, which makes the legs we possess strike the feet inside our shoes against the ground, in the oblivious act of walking. Perhaps we don’t even feel that. There’s a squeezing in our head around the eyes, and as if fingers were plugging our ears.

It’s like a head-cold of the soul. And this literary image of being sick makes us wish that life were a convalescence, obliging us to stay off our feet. And the idea of convalescence makes us think of villas on the outskirts of town – not the gardens that surround them but their cosy interiors, far from the road and the turning wheels. No, we don’t feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep. We pass through everything. Where’s your tambourine, O bear that just stands there?