Compared with real, ordinary men who walk down the streets of life with a natural, fortuitous goal in mind, those who sit around in cafés cut a figure that can be described only by comparing them to certain elves from dreams – creatures that aren’t exactly nightmarish or anguishing but whose remembrance, when we wake up, leaves a foul taste in our mouth that we don’t quite understand, a feeling of deep disgust that’s not for them, directly, but for something they embody.

I see the world’s true geniuses and conquerors – both great and small – sailing in the night of things, oblivious to what their haughty prows are cutting through, in that gulfweed sea of packing straw and crumbled cork.

Everything is summed up in those cafés, just like in the inner court behind the office building, which through the grating of the warehouse window looks like a jail cell for confining rubbish.