I realize now that I’ve failed, and it only surprises me that I didn’t foresee that I was going to fail. What was there in me to suggest I might triumph? I had neither the conqueror’s blind force nor the madman’s sure vision. I was lucid and sad, like a cold day.

Clear things console me, and sunlit things console me. To see life passing by under a blue sky makes up for a lot. I forget myself indefinitely, forgetting more than I could ever remember. The sufficiency of things fills my weightless, translucent heart, and just to look is a sweet satisfaction. I’ve never been more than a bodiless gaze, whose only soul was a slight breeze that passed by and saw.

I have something of the spirit of a bohemian, of those who let life slip away, like something that slips through one’s fingers because the gesture to seize it falls asleep at the mere idea. But I never had the outward compensation of the bohemian spirit – the carefree acceptance of come-and-go emotions. I was never more than an isolated bohemian, which is an absurdity; or a mystic bohemian, which is an impossibility.

I’ve lived certain moments of respite in the presence of Nature, moments sculpted out of tender isolation, that will always be like medals for me. In these moments I forgot all of my life’s goals, all of the paths I wanted to follow. An immense spiritual tranquillity fell into the blue lap of my aspirations and allowed me to enjoy being nothing. But I’ve probably never enjoyed an incorruptible moment, free of any underlying spirit of failure and gloom. In all my moments of spiritual liberation there was a dormant sorrow, vaguely blooming in gardens beyond the walls of my consciousness, and the scent and the very colour of those sad flowers intuitively passed through the stone walls, whose far side (where the roses bloomed) never ceased being a hazy near side in the obscure mystery of who I am, in the drowsiness of my daily existence.

It was in an inner sea that the river of my life ended. All around my dreamed mansion the trees were yellow with autumn. This circular landscape is my soul’s crown of thorns. The happiest moments of my life were dreams, and dreams of sorrow, and I saw myself in their ponds like a blind Narcissus who enjoyed the coolness as he bent over the water, aware of his reflection there through an inner, nocturnal vision that was confided to his abstract emotions and maternally adored in the recesses of his imagination.

Your necklaces of imitation pearls loved with me my finest hours. Carnations were our preferred flower, perhaps because they didn’t suggest pomp. Your lips solemnly celebrated the irony of your own smile. Did you really understand your destiny? It was because you knew it without understanding it that the mystery written in the sadness of your eyes had cast a pall on your resigned lips. Our Homeland was too far away for roses. In the cascades of our gardens the water was pellucid with silences. In the tiny hollows of the rocks over which the water flowed, there were secrets from our childhood and dreams the same size as our toy soldiers of old, which we could station on the cascades’ stones, in the static execution of a huge military operation, with nothing lacking in our dreams, and nothing lagging in our imagination.

I know I’ve failed. I enjoy the vague voluptuosity of failure like one who, in his exhaustion, appreciates the fever that laid him up.

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they simply didn’t turn up, or because the friendship I had imagined was an error of my dreams. I’ve always lived alone, and ever more alone as I’ve become more self-aware.