S̶e̶a̶n̶’s Reviews > Zenobia > Status Update

A few leaves stretched out to caress me, the poplars came closer and with them the acacia. They stuck to me, covering me. It was getting dark, but I could make out in detail every little branch, every leaf, every vein, I even saw the reddish-yellow spots on the few leaves of the walnut tree that had forgotten to fall off in winter. I floated in that halo, the treetops had covered the whole horizon, I felt good there.

The French librarian Louis Perin, while making an inventory of the objects used by readers as bookmarks and forgotten between the pages of the volumes at the library where he works, noted--besides postcards, greeting cards, and letters--ties, shoelaces, combs, toothpicks, parsley leaves, cheese rinds, fish bones, strips of bacon, and an unexecuted will.

They wanted only to ascertain whether they had shoved me into the machinery; I felt like screaming, I had a brain too, as miserable as you like, it did what it could, among other things it was the author of my errors too, and they forced me to wrap my brain up in their moth-eaten sock while it growled like a dog that I carried in my skull.

Everything was happening according to the laws of a strange active indifference; thanks to it, the most insignificant gestures gained in importance while the limits of the conscious will grew more and more unstable: anything that happened seemed at the same time constant and reversible, certain and treacherous, but we'd better change the subject . . .