After the heat had lulled and the light beginning of rain increased until it could be heard, there was a tranquillity that the air didn’t have when it was hot, a new peace in which the water blew its own breeze. So clear was the joy of this soft rain, with no darkness or threat of storm, that even those without raincoats or umbrellas (which was almost everyone) laughingly talked as they stepped quickly down the glistening street.

During an idle moment I walked over to the open office window – the heat had caused it to be opened, but the rain hadn’t caused it to be shut – and looked with intense and indifferent concentration, as is my custom, at what I just finished accurately describing before I saw it. Yes, there went the joy of two banal souls, smiling as they talked in the fine rain, walking more briskly than hurriedly in the veiled yet luminous, limpid day.

But suddenly, popping into my view from behind a corner, there appeared an old, mean-looking, poor and unhumble man who impatiently made his way in the rain that was letting up. He surely had no special aim, but at least he had impatience. I looked at him with concentration, no longer the careless kind applied to things, but the kind that discerns symbols. He was the symbol of nobody, which is why he was in a hurry. He was the symbol of those who were never anything; that is why he suffered. He belonged not to those who smile as they feel the rain’s joyful discomfort, but to the rain itself – a man so unconscious that he felt reality.

That’s not what I wanted to say, however. Something stepped in between my observation of the passer-by (whom I had at any rate lost from view, because I’d stopped looking at him) and the thread of my reflections; some mystery from the unobserved, some urgency of the soul, stepped in and prevented me from continuing. And in the depths of my distraction I hear, without hearing, the voices of the packers at the far end of the office, where the warehouse begins, and without seeing I see the twine used for parcels, doubly knotted and doubly strung around the volumes wrapped in heavy brown paper, on the table next to the back window, among jokes and scissors.

To see is to have seen.