I’m suffering from a headache and the universe. Physical aches, more blatantly painful than moral ones, reflect in the spirit and set off tragedies not contained in them. They make the sufferer cross with everything, and everything naturally includes every star.

I do not share, have never shared, and can’t imagine ever sharing that degenerate concept that regards us, as living souls, to be consequences of a material thing called the brain, which originates and resides in another material thing known as the cranium. I cannot be a materialist, which I believe is what one calls an adherent to this concept, for I cannot establish a clear relationship – I mean a visual relationship – between a tangible mass of grey or otherwise coloured matter and this thing known as the I that behind my gaze sees the skies and thinks about them, and imagines skies that don’t exist. But even if I cannot fall into the pit of supposing that one thing is another just because they’re in the same place, like a wall and my shadow on it, or that my soul’s dependence on my brain is any greater than my dependence, when travelling, on the vehicle that carries me, I do believe there is a social relationship between what in us is pure spirit and what in us is the body’s spirit, such that quarrels can occur between them. And what usually occurs is that the more ordinary of the two persons gets on the other’s nerves. My head aches today, and perhaps my stomach is the source of its aching. But the ache, once it is suggested by my stomach to my head, interrupts the meditation that goes on behind my thinking brain. Covering my eyes won’t blind me, but it will keep me from seeing. And so now, because my head aches, I find nothing at all admirable or worthwhile in the show going on outside me which, in this absurd and monotonous moment, I don’t even wish to see as the world. My head aches, which means I’m aware that matter has offended me, and, as happens when one is offended, I’m resentful and apt to be irritable with everyone, including whoever hasn’t offended me but happens to be near by.

What I feel like doing is dying, at least temporarily, but this, as I’ve indicated, is only because my head aches. And it suddenly occurs to me how much more eloquently a great prose stylist would say this. Sentence by sentence he would elaborate on the anonymous grief of the world; the imagining eyes behind his paragraphs would scan the earth’s various human dramas; and through the feverish throbbing of his temples an entire metaphysics of woe and misery would take shape on paper. But I don’t have an eloquent style. My head aches because my head aches. The universe hurts me because my head hurts. But the universe that actually hurts me is not the true one, which exists because it doesn’t know I exist, but that other universe which belongs only to me and which, should I pass my hands through my hair, makes me feel that each strand suffers for no other reason than to make me suffer.