After the last rains left the sky for earth, making the sky clear and the earth a damp mirror, the brilliant clarity of life that returned with the blue on high and that rejoiced in the freshness of the water here below left its own sky in our souls, a freshness in our hearts.

Whether we like it or not we’re servants of the hour and its colours and shapes, we’re subjects of the sky and earth. Even those who delve only in themselves, disdaining what surrounds them, delve by different paths when it rains and when it’s clear. Obscure transmutations, perhaps felt only in the depths of abstract feelings, occur because it rains or stops raining. They’re felt without our feeling them because the weather we didn’t feel made itself felt.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. At this very moment, jotting down these impressions during a break that’s excusable because today there’s not much work, I’m the one who is attentively writing them, I’m the one who is glad not to have to be working right now, I’m the one seeing the sky outside, invisible from in here, I’m the one thinking about all of this, I’m the one feeling my body satisfied and my hands still a bit cold. And my entire world of all these souls who don’t know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow – the calm, bookkeeping body with which I lean over Borges’s tall desk, where I’ve come to get the blotter that he borrowed from me.