...of vacancy

Joseph, still leaning against the wall outside the grocery, saw the landscape slowly changing into a desert; he felt the continual movement of the air entering his lungs, edging into the most secret depths of his organs. Icy breezes began to blow inside his body; his bones grew weak, his muscles ceased to obey him. His clothes hung loosely on him like tattered rags, as though upon a scarecrow, and his hands, their fingers mottled, opened and closed several times, meeting only emptiness. The wind was blowing in his head as well; it had tightened into a sort of icy, restless, tumultuous ball, which had scattered all his ideas. The whole landscape had got inside his skull, a great scene of nakedness and cold, where the street lay motionless, lined with white houses, where the pavements were taken up by earthenware pitchers in which geraniums shivered with tiny vibrations, where every object, moving, calm and ferocious - the cars, the black-glinting window-panes, the translucid sky, the concrete telegraph poles, the road - was set there as though to all eternity, immovable, disorderly, crushing in its weight and silence, stable and savage in the corridor through which the wind was rushing.

[A Day of Old Age, from Fever, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]