How long since I last wrote something! In the past few days I’ve lived through centuries of wavering renunciation. I’ve stagnated, like a forsaken pond, among landscapes that don’t exist.

Meanwhile I’ve been going through the varied monotony of every day, the never-equal succession of the equal hours, life. Everything has been going well. If I’d been sleeping, it wouldn’t have gone any differently. I’ve stagnated, like a pond that doesn’t exist, among forsaken landscapes.

It often happens that I don’t know myself, which is typical in those who know themselves. I look at myself in the various disguises that make me alive. Of all that changes, I possess whatever remains the same; of all that is accomplished, whatever amounts to nothing.

I remember far-off inside me, as if I were journeying within, the monotony of that old house in the country, so different from the monotony I feel now… I spent my childhood in that house, but I couldn’t say (if I ever wanted to) whether it was happier or sadder than my life today. It was a different self that lived back then. That life and this one are different, diverse, incomparable. The same monotonies that link them on the outside are undoubtedly different on the inside. They’re not just two monotonies, but two lives.

Why do I bother to remember? Weariness. Remembering is a repose, for it means not doing. For even greater repose, I sometimes remember what never was, and my memories of the countryside where I really lived can’t begin to compare, in sharpness and nostalgia, to my memories that inhabit – floorboard by creaking floorboard – the vast rooms of yesteryear that I never inhabited.

I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed, as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling. Memories turn into dreams, dreams into my forgetting what I dreamed, and knowing myself into not thinking of myself.

I’ve so stripped myself of my own being that existence consists of dressing up. I’m only myself when disguised. And all around me expiring, unknown sunsets gild the landscapes I’ll never see.