“Talking to yourself is an art, talking to others is a distraction,” thought Andrei, as he wandered into the broom and rag cupboard. His expressionless silence made his scrawny body look more and more like that minuscule spectator who lives in every man, who plays no part in their action or in their suffering, who keeps a continual sangfroid, who is always the same. His task is to see and to witness, but he has no voting rights in human life, and knows of no reason for his solitary existence. “I, too, can see,” thought Andrei, “but I could never say I see.” That nook of consciousness is illuminated day and night, like the doorkeeper’s room in a grand apartment block. The doorkeeper is always vigilant, knows everyone in the building, but not one of them would ask his advice on personal matters. They come and go, the doorkeeper-spectator follows them with his eyes. The occupant, going out, leaves his wife there and is never anxious about the doorkeeper, who at times looks sad in his impotent knowingness, but is always courteous and discreet. He is the eunuch of the human soul. He lives elsewhere. If there’s a blaze, he telephones for the fire engine and watches what happens from outside. “Who would ever say that I’d been an engineer before becoming this creature, that I had taken part in great land reclamation, and wanted to make the waters rise up from the Yellow Springs to establish socialism in the steppe?”

(… listening to a story that is a person, a time changed into space, a space that expands and coils in time, resting on a false present, a shining hollow, turned toward an echoing past; not knowing where our feet will give way: but appearing all around are the noble remnants of an architecture, which yet is no more solid than a film skimming over other surfaces, whose sheen no one will tarnish; crossing it, we find ourselves on the land of now, rich in short-lived memories that are superimposed on one another, though now they are like visitors, aliens to this or any other soil.)

The misfortunes of Homo naturalis. He emits an odor, merely from living, has a brusque and awkward manner. Caught by sudden drowsiness, he walks, listens, always captive to curiosity. He cautiously sniffs every corner before making his temporary home there. Indecent toward kitchen maids, myopic toward distant fate, prone to sentiment beneath his rough and fragile exterior, he remembers infant solitude.

Drifting is a necessity for him, in his thoughts as in his pleasures, remaining distrustful of their origin. Passing over, never stopping on one point and disturbing the ground, for it will clutch at his feet. Casual and aimless, he’d like to be seen as grateful, or at least cheerful: but he creates surprise with certain coarse words that leave a trace of vitriol, accompanied by a demeaning laugh, covered by a false courtesy. He enjoys scratching the rancid, uncleanable crust at the base of existence. As though bound up inside a barrel, his sight closed on all sides, he writhes about, shaken by the irrepressible laughter of the Homo deiectus, and with small nervous scissors he cuts every tie. It is a throttling fit of laughter, of the kind Molière had onstage before he suffocated.