Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.

This has nothing to do with anything.

I’ve dreamed a great deal. I’m tired from having dreamed but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t weigh a thing; it’s a dreamless sleep in which we’re awake. In dreams I’ve done everything. I’ve also woken up, but so what? How many Caesars I’ve been! And the great men of history – how mean-spirited! Caesar, after his life was spared by a merciful pirate, ordered a search to find the pirate, who was then crucified. Napoleon, in the will he wrote in Saint Helena, made a bequest to a common criminal who tried to assassinate Wellington. O greatness of spirit no greater than that of the squint-eyed neighbour lady! O great men of another world’s cook! How many Caesars I’ve been and still dream of being.

How many Caesars I’ve been, but not the real ones. I’ve been truly imperial while dreaming, and that’s why I’ve never been anything. My armies were defeated, but the defeat was fluffy, and no one died. I lost no flags. My dream didn’t get as far as the army; my flags never turned the corner into full dreamed view. How many Caesars I’ve been, right here, on the Rua dos Douradores. And the Caesars I’ve been still live in my imagination; but the Caesars that were are dead, and the Rua dos Douradores – Reality, that is – cannot know them.

I throw an empty matchbox towards the abyss that’s the street beyond the sill of my high window without balcony. I sit up in my chair and listen. Distinctly, as if it meant something, the empty matchbox resounds on the street, declaring to me its desertedness. Not another sound can be heard, except the sounds of the whole city. Yes, the sounds of the city on this long Sunday – so many, all at odds, and all of them right.

How little, from the real world, forms the support of the best reflections: the fact of arriving late for lunch, of running out of matches, of personally, individually throwing the matchbox out the window, of feeling out of sorts for having eaten late, the fact it’s Sunday virtually guaranteeing a lousy sunset, the fact I’m nobody in the world, and all metaphysics.

But how many Caesars I’ve been!