Elevating disgrace into splendour, I created for myself a pageantry of pain and effacement. I didn’t make a poem out of my pain, but I used it to make a cortège. And from the window that looks on to myself I contemplate in awe the deep-red sunsets, the wispy twilights of my sorrows without cause, where the dangers, burdens and failures of my innate incapacity for existing march by in processions of my aimlessness. The child in me that never died still watches and excitedly waves at the circus I stage for myself. He laughs at the clowns, who exist only in the circus; he fixes his eyes on the stunt men and the acrobats as if they were the whole of life. And thus all the unsuspected anguish of a human soul about to burst, all the incurable despair of a heart forsaken by God, sleeps the innocent child’s sleep, without joy and yet contented, within the four walls of my room with their ugly, peeling paper.

I walk not through the streets but through my sorrow. The flanking rows of buildings are all the incomprehension that surrounds my soul;..... my footsteps resound against the pavement like a ridiculous death knell, a frightful noise in the night, final like a receipt or a tomb.

Stepping back from myself, I see that I’m the bottom of a well.

The man I never was died. God forgot who I should have been. I’m just a vacant interlude. If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!