I wonder how many have contemplated, with the attention it merits, a deserted street with people in it. This sentence, by its phrasing, seems to want to say something else, and indeed it does. A deserted street is not a street no one walks on, but a street on which people walk as if it were deserted. This isn’t hard to understand, provided one has seen it: a zebra can’t be grasped by a man who doesn’t know more than a donkey.

Our sensations change according to how we understand them and to what extent. There are ways of understanding that have special ways of being understood.

There are days when a tedium, a bitterness, an anxiety about life seems to rise to my head from the ground underneath me, and I would say it’s intolerable if I didn’t in fact tolerate it. It’s a strangling of the life inside me, a longing to be another in all of my pores, a brief glimpse of the end.