The slight inebriation of a mild fever, with its soft and penetrating discomfort that’s cold in our aching bones and warm in our eyes, under our throbbing temples – I adore that discomfort like a slave his beloved oppressor. It puts me in that state of feeble, quivering passivity in which I glimpse visions, turn corners of ideas and get lost among sudden and unexpected feelings.

Thinking, feeling and wanting become a single confused thing. Beliefs, sensations, imagined things and real things get all mixed up, like the contents of various drawers overturned on to the floor.