“Now, one might think I could easily get lost in the crowd here, on the much-celebrated Paris boulevards, which, as we all know, sport the dregs of the melting pot like the head on a glass of pilsner beer. I don’t stand out in any way, either in clothing or in conduct, I am not visibly stunted or crippled, not spastic or mongoloid, and I don’t have an obvious nervous tic—an angular jerking of the head out of the shirt collar, or even a sneering sidelong twist of the mouth, tightening the nostrils and giving them a deathly pallor; in short, I am conspicuous by being inconspicuous, as it were. And still, the stares of all who come toward me tell me that I am a stranger, that I am essentially, substantially, and fundamentally foreign, and yet am nevertheless no more foreign than anyone else.

“The stares of the people coming toward me are neither curious nor disapproving nor even hostile, but certainly not pleasant or friendly. All they express is complete indifference. But they want me to feel this indifference. As if I were supposed to realize that I am not worth so much as a shrug, even as an alien. Just like any fellow Frenchman. On se fout de vous, monsieur, because it’s intrinsic in the French national character. On se fout de vous comme on se fout de tout le monde, mêmes de nous-mêmes.

“But beyond that, I am devoid of a physiognomy, as far as they are concerned. I could run around without a face, as if painted by Magritte: a patch of blue sky with a cumulus cloudlet between hat and coat collar. But the French seem eager to make me aware of the abstract manner in which I exist here without existing for them, the abstract manner in which we all exist here without existing for one another: optically experienced not as human faces but as physiognomic splotches in the continuously and nervously altered, shifted, changing mosaic of the city; flesh-colored swabs in the torrent of hundreds of thousands of nonexistent coexisters on the streets, avenues, boulevards, and promenades; the flotsam of detached anatomical parts—a pair of eyes, an ear, a nose, a tuft of hair (lots of hair recently, long smooth curly kinky bushy shaggy matted hair), a bald pate, an extremely beautiful wart, the amazing craquelure of veins in a drunkard’s cheeks, the scrotum-like bags under a rich dowager’s Saint Bernard eyes, the ludicrous drama in an intellectual’s knitted brow. . . drifting rubbish, as I said, lamentable testimonies to earlier human presence in a flooded area. The inundating element in which all these things float is the French national consciousness. And now I ask you: Is this a suitable price to pay for form? . . .