Walking along the street, I often hear snatches of private conversations, and they’re almost all about another woman, another man, a friend’s boyfriend or someone else’s girlfriend ..... Just to hear these shadows of human speech (which is all that occupies most conscious lives) fills me with a sickening tedium, an anguished feeling of being exiled among spiders, and a sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people, condemned to being looked upon by the landlord and the whole neighbourhood as a tenant just like everyone else on the block. And it’s with loathing that I peer through the
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