...of the external

So, cleaving through the air on her moped, the young girl advanced towards the end of her journey. A damp film covered her eyes. Her half-parted lips looked as though they were drinking some invisible liquid, and light shone from the glass of her head lamp. This was how she looked as she passed through the various barriers and bridges, the multiple layers of sounds and odours, smoke and ice. She rode through them all, supported by the single wire of that harsh, sawing noise, then dwindled away and vanished at the bottom of the street. At the same instant as I, or we, saw this door (as it were) opening for her between two solid blocks of houses, the siren stopped. There was absolute silence. And nothing, nothing remained in our minds, not even a living memory. From that day everything began to go bad, rotten. Today I, Francois Besson, see death everywhere.
From time to time (I may either be up or in bed) I stiffen, and stare out through the window, forehead pressed against the cold glass. Behind the closed shutters I see a long curving street with people walking up and down it. A violet shadow has fallen across the ground; and it is on this shadow that men and women walk, not saying a word, slip away into oblivion and are gone. The glow of the lighted street-lamps and the glitter from the shop-windows are both reflected all around: the shadows retreat reluctantly, like fringes of dark fur. Everywhere twinkling points of light are visible.
They are dead, I know it, no question about that; they are dead because everything external to myself is dead; a faint aura in the semblance of a winding-sheet hangs about their silhouettes as they pass. I feel as though I were casually leafing through some vast periodicals that had ceased publication, and that it was on its pages I saw these printed names and faded photographs, the headlines and dates and figures, the blunted rubrics. Buildings and images have now been replaced by a bare and silent cemetery, some ten thousand yards in extent. I see future generations arriving here. I see funerals and memorial plaques. Today the world is finished. Nothing lives any more. Ecstasy and pain are mere geometrical expressions.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]