was it not boundlessly vain and trivial of HIM who fed on worlds like a whale on plankton? . . .

“This,” I said to Schwab, “is the result of my search for God. If HE does exist, then HE has indulged in a bad joke at my expense. I find that HE has gone a bit too far.”

I sensed something quite unusual piercing my lids, which I kept shut: some light narrowed to the sharpness of a knife. So I opened my eyes.

•

The light (like the wan city light in my Viennese relatives’ murky apartment) came through a crack in the shutters (I usually keep them closed even in the daytime: I live by lamplight: that is how I elude time).

I could not tell whether it was the ethereal and as yet unthickened light of the first hour of morning or the self-transfigured, renunciatory light of a gloriously waning day of sunshine shortly before evening. It seemed to be neither, and yet it was so fluid and bright, such as even the most glorious day of sunshine never is. Like a sword blade, it sliced through the twilit darkness of the room and cut into my eyes. I had to close them again, and I sniffed and listened (one can hear the quality of time in silence).

It was silent. (It is always almost uncannily silent in this filthy hotel—its sole advantage, by the way. It is so silent that at night I can hear the humming of the telephone on the switchboard in the handsome Pole’s desk two floors below me.)

I compared this silence with the memory of other silences into which I had occasionally listened (the dull, heavy ones at night, when everyone was asleep; the brooding, ruminating ones of afternoons when the always freezing Algerians, in coats with turned-up collars and army-surplus scarves to the tips of their noses, crept into their beds in large family groups, and traveling salesmen entered their daily balances in their notebooks or, with intricate knowledge of amorous positions, were inside the women they had picked up; and especially a silence in which I had endured sublime misery three years ago in this very room, when I had waited in vain for Dawn to call me to her). . .

an unbelievably eloquent silence, which contained Paris like a dissolved pigment

—the essence of the city in its silence, as if it were not merely that certain forms, colors, images, sounds, noises, and smells worked together to produce its specific, unmistakable impression (the Parisian quality of Paris) but that the myriads of continual, conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious perceptions of a here and now with which the teeming human swarm out there, in the streets and buildings, experiencing themselves as in Paris, were weaving themselves into something objective, empirically ascertainable, positively material, which entered the people as it did the breathed air, the squares, the trees on the boulevards, and every single stone of this city; and as if this aura of the Paris that is unmistakably to be perceived as Paris first became truly free and perceptible in the silence, so that if one brought a deaf and blind person here without telling him where he was, he would instantly have to sense it as specifically Parisian—