Cincinnatus, as he is called, is an individual who is in some existential or even ontological sense opaque, and who creates an impression ‘as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another’. He longs to be transparent, however, like everyone else in society; and has therefore learned ‘to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions’.49 At times, too, he seems to strip himself down to the state of nothingness that defines others.
