In the light morning fog of mid-spring, the downtown area wakes up groggy and the sun rises as if sluggishly. There’s a calm joy in the slightly cold air, a kind of non-breeze softly blows, and life vaguely shivers from the cold that has ceased – not from the bit of cold that lingers but from the memory of the cold; not from today’s weather but in comparison with the approaching summer.

The shops are still closed except for the cafés and dairy bars, but the stillness isn’t one of torpor, like on Sundays – it’s just stillness. A blond tinge streaks the air that’s emerging from the night, and through the dissipating fog the blueness lightly blushes. The first signs of movement dot the streets, with each pedestrian standing out distinctly, while up above hazy figures can be seen stirring in the few open windows. The clanging trams trace their yellow, numbered furrows in mid-air. Little by little the streets begin to undesert.

I drift without thoughts or emotions, just sense impressions. I woke up early and came out to the street without preconceptions. I observe as if in a reverie. I see as if deep in thought. And a gentle mist of emotion absurdly rises up in me. The fog that’s disappearing outside seems to be seeping into me.

I realize that I’ve been inadvertently thinking about my life. I hadn’t noticed, but that’s what I was doing. I thought I was no more in my leisurely stroll than a reflector of given images, a blank screen on which reality projects colours and light instead of shadows. But I was unwittingly more than that. I was also my self-denying soul, and even my abstract observing was a denial.

As the mist diminishes, the air darkens, imbued by a pale light that seems to have incorporated the mist. I suddenly notice that it’s much noisier and that many more people exist. The steps of the now more numerous pedestrians are less hurried. And then, breaking in on everyone else’s lesser haste, the sprightly fishwives pop into view, bakers come swaying under their monstrously large breadbaskets, and the diverse sameness of the street vendors is only demonotonized by the contents of their baskets, in which the colours vary more than the actual objects. The unequal cans of the milkmen jangle like absurd hollow keys. The policemen stand stock-still in the intersections, like civilization’s uniformed denial of the invisibly rising day.

How I would love right now to be able to see all this as somebody whose only relation to it was visual – to view everything as an adult traveller who has just arrived at the surface of life! To not have learned from birth to attach predetermined meanings to all these things. To be able to see them in their natural self-expression, irrespective of the expressions that have been imposed on them. To be able to recognize the fishwife in her human reality, independent of her being called a fishwife and my knowing that she exists and sells fish. To see the policeman as God sees him. To notice everything for the first time, not as apocalyptic revelations of life’s Mystery, but as direct manifestations of Reality. Bells or a large clock strike what, without counting, I know must be eight o’clock. I awaken from myself because of the banality of measured time, that cloister which society imposes on time’s continuity, a border to contain the abstract, a boundary around the unknown. I see that the mist which has completely quit the sky (except for the quasi-blue that still lingers in the blueness) has indeed penetrated into my soul, and has likewise penetrated to the depths of things where they have contact with my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I was seeing. My eyes see, but I am blind. I’ve begun to perceive things with the banality of knowledge. What I see is no longer Reality, it’s just Life.

…Yes, the life to which I also belong, and which also belongs to me; and no longer Reality, which belongs only to God or to itself, which contains neither mystery nor truth, and which – since it is real or pretends to be real – exists somewhere invariably, free from having to be temporal or eternal, an absolute image, the external equivalent to the idea of a soul.

I turn and walk slowly, though faster than I think, to the door that will lead me back up to my rented room. But I don’t enter; I hesitate; I keep going. Praça da Figueira,* gaping with variously coloured wares and filling up with customers, blocks the horizon from my view. I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything: it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive.

Where are the living?