...of unreality

Sometimes, when Sorger thought about the city, he saw the pass rising from it, unreal, uninhabited, and even without vegetation, sunk in the sombre-grey granite of a stony mountain range; and toward the end of his stay his own person became just as unreal to him. Talking to no one, he had finally stopped talking to himself. For a time, long and short breaths had conveyed secret code messages, and he was almost relieved at the thought that he could manage without speech; it gave him a sense of perfection. Then he sensed a danger in his inner muteness - as though he were an inert object whose sound had died away forever - and he longed to have back the suffering of speech. Unreality meant that anything could happen, but he was no longer able to do anything about it. Wasn’t he resisting an overwhelming power? Sorger feared the decision because he would have no part in it. He had lost his image of himself (which ordinarily enabled him to take action); and there was no one - though he often looked around for the women from Earthquake Park - to set limits for him by touching him. He consistently did his work (preliminary notes for his projected paper), without side glances at anything else, without stopping, in a state of frenzied concentration. And the city moved away from him, as though, little by little, all the windows had been closed to him. Yet “being forgotten” had once been a pleasant thought, and “arranging to be forgotten,” an art.

[The Long Way Around, from Slow Home-Coming, Handke, P.]