There are inner sufferings so subtle and so diffuse that we can’t tell whether they belong to the body or the soul, whether they’re an anxiety that comes from our feeling that life is futile or an indisposition originating in some organic abyss such as the stomach, liver or brain. How often my normal self-awareness becomes turbid with the stirred dregs of an anguished stagnation! How often it hurts me to exist, with a nausea so indefinite I’m not sure if it’s tedium or a warning that I’m about to vomit! How often…

Today my soul is sad unto my body. All of me hurts: memory, eyes and arms. It’s like a rheumatism in all that I am. My being isn’t touched by the day’s limpid brightness, by the sheer blue sky, by this unabating high tide of diffuse light. I’m not soothed by the soft cool breeze – autumnal but reminiscent of summer – which gives the air personality. Nothing touches me. I’m sad, but not with a definite sadness, nor even with an indefinite sadness. I’m sad down there, on the street littered with packing crates.

These expressions don’t exactly translate what I feel, for surely nothing can exactly translate what one feels. But I try to convey at least some impression of what I feel, a blend of various views of me and of the street, which is also, since I see it, a part of me in some profound way I can’t fathom.

I’d like to live a different life in far-off lands. I’d like to die as someone else among unfamiliar flags. I’d like to be acclaimed emperor in other eras, better today because they’re not of today, and we see them as hazy, colourful, enigmatic novelties. I’d like to have all that could make what I am ridiculous, and precisely because it would make what I am ridiculous. I’d like, I’d like… But there’s always the sun when the sun is shining and the night when the night falls. There’s always grief when grief troubles us and dreams when dreams lull us. There’s always what there is, and never what there should be, not for being better or worse but for being different. There’s always…

The loaders are clearing the crates off the street. Amid jokes and laughter they place the crates one by one on to wagons. I’m looking down at them from my office window, with sluggish eyes whose eyelids are sleeping. And something subtle and inscrutable links what I feel to the freight that’s being loaded; some strange sensation makes a crate out of all my tedium, or anxiety, or nausea, which is hoisted on the shoulders of someone who’s loudly joking and then loaded on to a wagon that’s not there. And in the narrow street, the ever serene daylight diagonally shines on where they’re hoisting the crates – not on the crates themselves, which are in the shade, but on the far corner where the delivery boys are occupied in doing nothing, indeterminately.