The trivial things that make up life, the trifles of the ordinary and routine, like a dust that underscores – with a hideous, smudged line – the sordidness and vileness of my human existence: the Cashbook lying open before eyes that dream of countless Orients; the office manager’s inoffensive joke that offends the whole universe; the could you please ask Senhor Vasques to call me, his girlfriend, Miss so -and-so, right when I was pondering the most asexual part of an aesthetic and intellectual theory.

And then there are one’s friends, good fellows, good fellows, great to be with them and talk, to have lunch together, dinner together, but all of it, I don’t know, so sordid and pathetic and trivial, because even on the street we remain in the fabric warehouse, even overseas we’re still seated before the Cashbook, and even in infinity we still have our boss.

Everyone has an office manager with a joke that’s out of place, and everyone has a soul that falls outside the normal universe. Everyone has a boss and the boss’s girlfriend, and the phone call that arrives at the inevitably worst moment, when the evening is wondrously falling and girlfriends politely offer their apologies [?] or else leave messages for their lover, who we all know has gone out for a fancy tea.

All who dream – even if they don’t dream in a downtown Lisbon office, bent over the accounts of a fabric warehouse – have before them a Cashbook, which may be the woman they married, or the administration of a future they’ve inherited, or anything at all that positively exists.

All of us who dream and think are assistant bookkeepers in a fabric warehouse or in some other business in this or another downtown. We enter amounts and lose; we add up totals and pass on; we close the books and the invisible balance is always against us.

The words I write make me smile, but my heart is ready to break – to break like things that shatter into fragments, shards and debris, hauled away in a bin on somebody’s shoulders to the eternal rubbish cart of every City Council.

And everything is waiting, dressed up and expectant, for the King who will come and who is already arriving, for the dust of his retinue forms a new mist in the slowly appearing east, and the lances in the distance are already flashing with their own dawn.