In the faint shadows cast by the last light before evening gives way to night, I like to roam unthinkingly through what the city is changing into, and I walk as if nothing had a cure. I carry with me a vague sadness that’s pleasant to my imagination, less so to my senses. As my feet wander I inwardly skim, without reading, a book of text interspersed with swift images, from which I leisurely form an idea that’s never completed.

There are those who read as swiftly as they see, and they finish without having taken it all in. So I, from the book skimmed in my soul, glean a hazy story, remembrances of another wanderer, snatches of descriptions of twilights or moonlights, with garden paths in the middle, and various silk figures passing by, passing by…

I don’t discriminate between one and another tedium. I move along in the street, in the evening and in my dreamed reading all at the same time, and the roads are really travelled. I emigrate and rest, as if aboard a ship that’s already on the high sea.

Suddenly the dead street lamps light up in unison on the two extensions of the long curved street. My sadness increases, as if with a thud. The book has finished. In the viscous air of the abstract street there is only an external thread of feeling, like the slobber of an idiot Destiny, dripping on my soul’s consciousness. Another life, of the city at nightfall. Another soul, of one who watches the night. I walk uncertainly and allegorically, unreally sentient. I’m like a story that someone told, and so well was it told that I took on just a hint of flesh at the beginning of one of the chapters of this novel that’s the world: ‘At that moment a man could be seen walking slowly down So-and-so Street.’

What do I have to do with life?