There are days when everyone I meet, and especially the people I’m forced to have daily contact with, appear as symbols, and individually or together they form a prophetic or occult writing that obscurely describes my life. The office becomes a page with people for its words; the street is a book; the words I exchange with familiar or unfamiliar faces are phrases for which I have no dictionary, though I have an idea of what they mean. They speak, they tell, but it’s not of themselves that they speak or tell; they’re words, as I’ve said, that don’t disclose their meaning, but they allow glimpses. In my twilight vision I only vaguely distinguish what these sudden glass panes on the surfaces of things let show from the interior that they veil and reveal. I understand without knowledge, like a blind man when someone tells him about colours.

Walking along the street, I often hear snatches of private conversations, and they’re almost all about another woman, another man, a friend’s boyfriend or someone else’s girlfriend .....

Just to hear these shadows of human speech (which is all that occupies most conscious lives) fills me with a sickening tedium, an anguished feeling of being exiled among spiders, and a sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people, condemned to being looked upon by the landlord and the whole neighbourhood as a tenant just like everyone else on the block. And it’s with loathing that I peer through the bars of the storeroom’s back windows, seeing everybody’s rubbish heaped up in the rain in the grimy courtyard which is my life.