Falling between the buildings, in alternating patches of light and shadow (or of brighter and less bright light), the morning dawns over the city. It seems to come not from the sun but from the city itself, as if the sunlight emanated from the walls and rooftops – not from them physically, but because they happen to be there.

To see and feel it makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. Morning, spring, hope – they’re linked in music by the same melodic intention; they’re linked in the soul by the same memory of an identical intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I realize that all I can hope is for the day to end, like all days. Reason also sees the dawn. Whatever hope I placed in the day wasn’t mine; it was of those who just live the passing hour and whose outer way of understanding I happened, for a moment, to embody.

Hope? What do I have to hope for? The day doesn’t promise me more than the day, and I know it has a certain duration and an end. The light heartens but does not improve me, for I’ll walk away as the same man – just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder. When something is born, we can feel it as a birth or we can think about it having to die. Now, under the full light of the sun, the city landscape is like an open field of buildings – natural, vast and harmonious. But while seeing all this, can I forget that I exist? My consciousness of the city is, at its core, my consciousness of myself.

I suddenly remember when I was a child and saw, as today I cannot see, dawn breaking over the city. Back then it didn’t break for me but for life, because back then I (not being conscious) was life. I saw dawn break and felt happy; today I see dawn break, feel happy, and become sad. The child is still there but has fallen silent. I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open. Yes, I once belonged here; but today, before each landscape, no matter how fresh, I stand as a foreigner, a guest and pilgrim before it, an outsider of what I see and hear, old to myself.

I’ve seen everything, even what I’ve never seen nor will ever see. Even the memory of future landscapes flows in my blood, and my anxiety over what I’ll have to see again is already monotonous to me.

And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.