Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.