The advent of summer makes me sad. It seems that summer’s luminosity, though harsh, should comfort those who don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t comfort me. There’s too sharp a contrast between the teeming life outside me and the forever unburied corpse of my sensations – what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think. In this borderless country known as the universe, I feel like I’m living under a political tyranny that doesn’t oppress me directly but that still offends some secret principle of my soul. And then I’m slowly, softly seized by an absurd nostalgia for some future, impossible exile.

What I mostly feel is slumber. Not a slumber that latently brings – like all other slumbers, even those caused by sickness – the privilege of physical rest. Not a slumber that, because it’s going to forget life and perhaps bring dreams, bears the soothing gifts of a grand renunciation on the platter with which it approaches our soul. No: this is a slumber that’s unable to sleep, that weighs on the eyelids without closing them, that purses the corners of one’s disbelieving lips into what feels like a stupid and repulsive expression. It’s the kind of sleepiness that uselessly overwhelms the body when one’s soul is suffering from acute insomnia.

Only when night comes do I feel, not happiness, but a kind of repose which, since other reposes are pleasant, seems pleasant by way of analogy. Then my sleepiness goes away, and the confusing mental dusk brought on by the sleepiness begins to fade and to clear until it almost glows. For a moment there’s the hope of other things. But the hope is short-lived. What comes next is a hopeless, sleepless tedium, the unpleasant waking up of one who never fell asleep. And from the window of my room I gaze with my wretched soul and exhausted body at the countless stars – countless stars, nothing, nothingness, but countless stars…