It’s been months since I last wrote. I’ve lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I’ve felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven’t existed. I’ve been someone else. I’ve lived without thinking.

Today I suddenly returned to whom I am or dream I am. It was during a moment of great fatigue, after finishing a tedious assignment. I propped my elbows on the high slanted desk, rested my head against my hands, closed my eyes, and rediscovered myself.

In a far-away pseudo-slumber I remembered everything I had ever been, and as vividly as if it stood before my eyes I suddenly saw, before or after everything, the side of the old farm that opened on to the fields, and in the middle of the scene appeared the threshing-floor, empty.

I immediately felt how futile life is. As if prompted by a dull pain in my elbows, everything I was seeing, feeling, remembering and forgetting merged with the faint din from the street and the slight sounds of work as usual in the quiet office.

When I laid my hands on the desk and looked at what was there with a gaze that must have been heavy with dead worlds, the first thing I saw, with my physical eyes, was a blowfly (that soft buzzing that didn’t belong to the office!) poised on top of the inkstand. I looked at it from the depths of the abyss, anonymous and attentive. It was coloured by green shades of black-blue, and its shiny repulsiveness wasn’t ugly. A life!

Who knows for what supreme forces – gods or demons of Truth in whose shadow we roam – I may be nothing but a shiny fly that alights in front of them for a moment or two? A facile hypothesis? Trite observation? Philosophy with no real thought? Maybe. But I didn’t think: I felt. It was carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror that I made this ludicrous comparison. I was a fly when I compared myself to one. I really felt like a fly when I imagined I felt like one. And I felt I had a flyish soul, slept flyishly and was flyishly withdrawn. And what’s more horrifying is that I felt, at the same time, like myself. I automatically raised my eyes towards the ceiling, lest a lofty wooden ruler should swoop down to swat me, as I might swat that fly. When I lowered my eyes, the fly had fortunately disappeared without a sound, at least not any I could hear. The involuntary office was again without philosophy.