...of meaninglessness

But when the hour was over, my sleep suddenly fell away from me, and it was then that I began to feel alone for good. Half sleep had been, as it were, my last companion in solitude, my guide and protector. And now from one minute to the next it proved to be a delusion. My word-mangling dream had been for a whirligig of ghosts, and now my waking seemed to be the punishment it threatened. And this punishment consisted not in being exposed to the elements in an undoubtedly inhospitable place, but in being stricken dumb. Here, far from human society, objects ceased to have a language and became enemies, executioners in fact. Yet what was destroying me was not that the iron bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or execution - but that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the S, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.
So I fled. Not from dread of the tunnel’s history, not from the silence or the stifling air, or for fear of a cave-in or a lineman - I’d have been only too glad if the lineman had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and cursed me in every known and unknown language - but in a single impulse of horror at the otherworldly speechlessness that was pressing in on me, for over and above bodily death it meant destruction of the soul, which, now that I am trying to speak of it, is recurring more violently, more devastatingly than ever. Then I had only to run a few steps to be out in the open, whereas today I am confined to the tunnel; there is no escape, no niche, no parapet, and my only way to humankind is to equip the objects of a mute planet, whose prisoner I have become through wishing (mea culpa) to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworld - whether to defend a treasure there or for my protection. I do not know.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]