That locus of sensations known as my soul sometimes walks with me, consciously, through the city’s nocturnal streets, in the wearisome hours when I feel like a dream among dreams of a different sort, by the ..... gaslight, in the midst of the transitory sound of traffic.

As my body penetrates the lanes and side streets, my soul loses itself in intricate labyrinths of sensation. All that can disturbingly convey the notion of unreality and feigned existence, all that can demonstrate – not to abstract reason but ..... and concretely – how the place occupied by the universe is hollower than hollow: all this objectively unfolds before my detached spirit. I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates – heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal.

Verbal snatches of envy, lust and triviality collide with my sense of hearing. Whispered murmurs ..... ripple towards my consciousness.

Little by little I lose my clear awareness of the fact that I concurrently exist with all this, that I really move – seeing little but hearing – among shadows that represent beings and places where there actually are beings. It becomes gradually, darkly, indistinctly unintelligible to me how all of this can exist in the face of eternal time and infinite space.

Through a passive association of ideas, I start thinking about the men whose consciousness of that space and time was so analytically and intuitively acute that it lost touch with the world. It seems ludicrous that on nights no doubt like this one, in cities surely not very different from the one in which I contemplate, there were men such as Plato, Scotus Erigena,* Kant and Hegel who virtually forgot about all this, who became different from these people. And they ..... were from the same human race.....

With what horrible clarity even I, as I walk here and think these thoughts, feel distant, alien, confused and.....

I end my solitary peregrination. A vast silence, impassive to slight sounds, assaults and overwhelms me. In both body and spirit I feel sorely weary of things, all things, of simply being here, of ..... finding myself in this present state. I almost catch myself wanting to scream because of a feeling that I’m sinking in an ocean of ..... whose immensity has nothing to do with the infinity of space or the eternity of time, nor with anything that can be measured and named. In these moments of supremely silent terror, I don’t know what I materially am, what I normally do, what I usually want, feel and think. I feel cut off from myself, outside of my reach. The moral impulse to struggle, the intellectual effort to systematize and understand, the restless artistic yearning to produce something that I no longer fathom but that I remember having fathomed and that I call beauty – all of this vanishes from my sense of reality, all of this strikes me as not even worthy of being considered useless, empty and remote. I feel like a mere void, the illusion of a soul, the locus of a being, a conscious darkness where a strange insect ..... vainly seeks at least the warm memory of a light.