...of anxiety

It could be that I lived in the state of anxiety of a man obliged to take upon himself the anxiety and work of the day - a day that had not begun and was not yet shining except in the distant beginning of an image whose calm was distress and whose supremacy was origin and end. At night, when I got up, who got up with me? At that instant, there was no day, no night, no possibility, no expectation, no uneasiness, no repose, but nevertheless a man standing wrapped in the silence of this speech: there is no day and yet it is day, so that this woman sitting down there against the wall, her body half inclined, her head bent toward her knees, was no closer to me than I was near her, and the fact that she was there did not mean that she was there, nor I, but the conflagration of this speech: now it is happening, something is happening, the end is beginning.
When I opened the door, no one would ask me where I was going: there was no one to ask me. When I returned, no one asked me where had I been. Now, someone is asking me "Why, when did you go out?" "Just now."
It is true that I am talking about anxiety, but it is the shiver of joy that I'm talking about - and distress, but the luster of this distress. I may appear to be prey to the limitless torment of an exorbitant constraint that is also incomprehensible, to the point where if I say, if I too say, the day is night for me, I will express something of this torment. And yet, a mild torment, for in front of me is the lightning, behind me the fall, and in me the intimacy of the shock.

[When The Time Comes, Blanchot, M.]