Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. It is a journey of the mind through matter, and since it is the mind that journeys, that is where we live. And so there are contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely and more turbulently than those who live externally. The end result is what counts. What was felt is what was lived. A dream can tire us out as much as physical labour. We never live as hard as when we’ve thought a great deal.

The man in the corner of the dance-hall dances with all the dancers. He sees everything, and because he sees everything, he lives everything. Since everything is ultimately our own sensation, to have actual contact with a body counts for no more than seeing it or just remembering it. I dance, therefore, when I see someone dance. I second the English poet* who, lying in the grass and watching three mowers in the distance, said: ‘A fourth man is mowing, and that fourth am I.’

All of this, told the way I feel it, has to do with the great weariness that came over me today, suddenly and for no apparent reason. I’m not only weary, but embittered; and the bitterness is also a mystery. I feel so anguished I’m on the verge of tears – not the kind that are wept but the kind that stay inside: tears caused by a sickness of the soul, not by a sensible pain. How much I’ve lived without having lived! How much I’ve thought without having thought! I’m exhausted from worlds of static violence, from adventures I’ve experienced without moving a muscle. I’m surfeited with what I’ve never had and never will, jaded by gods that so far don’t exist. I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. My muscles are sore from all the effort I have never even thought of making.

Dull, silent, futile… The lofty sky is of a flawed, dead summer. I look at it as if it weren’t there. I sleep what I think, I’m lying down as I walk. I suffer without feeling anything. My enormous nostalgia is for nothing, is nothing, like the lofty sky that I don’t see, and that I’m staring at impersonally.