Fog or smoke? Was it rising from the ground or descending from the sky? Impossible to say: it seemed more like a disease of the air than an emanation or something descended. Sometimes it seemed more like an ailment of the eyes than a reality of nature.

Whatever it was, the entire landscape was cloaked by a hazy uneasiness made of forgetfulness and attenuation. It was as if the silence of the delinquent sun had taken shape in an imperfect body, or as if a general intuition that something was going to happen had caused the visible world to disguise itself.

It was hard to tell if the sky was filled with clouds or fog. It was all a torpid haze that was coloured here and there, a greyness with just a hint of yellow, except where it had dissolved into a false pink or had bluely stagnated, though this blue may have been the sky showing through rather than another blue overlaying it.

Nothing was definite, not even the indefinite. That’s why it was only natural to call the fog smoke, since it didn’t seem like fog, or to ask whether it was fog or smoke, it being impossible to determine. Even the air’s temperature contributed to the doubt. It wasn’t hot or cold or in between, but seemed to be composed of elements that had nothing to do with heat. Indeed, the fog that felt cool to the eyes seemed hot to the touch, as if sight and touch were two distinct modes of the same faculty of perception. One couldn’t even find, around the outlines of the trees or the corners of buildings, that blurring of contours and edges caused by true fog when it sets in, nor that slipping into view and out of view caused by real smoke. It was as if each thing projected its own vaguely diurnal shadow, in all directions, without a source of light to explain it as shadow, and without a specific place where it was projected to justify it as something visible.

Nor, in fact, was it visible: it was like something about to appear, equally throughout, as if it hesitated to be revealed.

And what feeling prevailed? The impossibility of having any feeling, the heart all broken to pieces in the mind, feelings all in a jumble, conscious existence in a stupor, and the heightening of some faculty akin to hearing – but in the soul – in order to apprehend a definitive, useless revelation that’s always on the verge of appearing, like truth, and that always remains, like truth, the twin of what never appears.

Even the desire to sleep, remembered by the mind, has withered because mere yawning seems like too much of an effort. Even to stop seeing hurts the eyes. And in the soul’s complete and colourless renunciation, only external, distant sounds constitute what’s left of the impossible world.

Ah, another world, other things, another soul with which to feel them, another mind with which to know this soul! Anything, even tedium – anything but this general blurring of the soul and things, this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!