Outside, in the slow moonlit night, the wind slowly shakes things that cast fluttering shadows. Perhaps it’s just hanging laundry from the floor above, but the shadows don’t know they’re from shirts, and they impalpably flutter in hushed harmony with everything else.

I left the shutters open so as to wake up early, but so far I haven’t succeeded in falling asleep or even in staying wide awake, and the night’s already so old that not a sound can be heard. There’s moonlight beyond the shadows of my room, but it doesn’t come through the window. It exists like a day of hollow silver, and the roof of the building opposite, which I can see from my bed, is liquid with a blackish whiteness. In the moon’s hard light there’s a sad peace, like lofty congratulations to someone who can’t hear them.

And without seeing, without thinking, my eyes now closed on my non-existent slumber, I meditate on what words can truly describe moonlight. The ancients would say that it is silvery or white. But this supposed whiteness actually consists of many colours. Were I to get out of bed and look past the cold panes, I know I would see that in the high lonely air the moonlight is greyish white, blued by a subdued yellow; that over the various, unequally dark rooftops it bathes the submissive buildings with a black white and floods the red brown of the highest clay tiles with a colourless colour. At the end of the street – a placid abyss where the naked cobblestones are unevenly rounded – it has no colour other than a blue which perhaps comes from the grey of the stones. In the depths of the horizon it must be almost dark blue, different from the black blue in the depths of the sky. On the windows where it strikes, the moonlight is a black yellow.

From here in my bed, if I open my eyes, heavy with the sleep I cannot find, it looks like snow turned into colour, with floating threads of warm nacre. And if I think with what I feel, it’s a tedium turned into white shadow, darkening as if eyes were closing on this hazy whiteness.