...of the mind

I am walking. I move through the town, and my feet slap the tough ground. Silence has closed around me. I walk on the horizontal ground and hear nothing. The silence has swollen horribly in my head, has pressed against me with all its strength. I advance without knowing where I am going, the world has suddenly been emptied of its sounds. The ground is hard, flat. The walls are high. The roofs are not visible. The sky is an immense, deserted esplanade. Around me, the movements of fast cars, the itineraries of people. From behind my glass screen I walk like a deaf man, enclosed within my peaceful bubble. People cry out and I hear nothing. Cars spurt forward with roaring engines, jet aircraft fly through the clouds, and I hear nothing. Well, I do hear them in a way, I register the rumblings and the horn blasts. My ears vibrate with noises. But it is inside my head that I am deaf. All these ruthless, earsplitting sounds are around me. I can see them all, really, just as they are, large dark splotches bearing down on me, pack of mad dogs, circular waves radiating from the sun, arrows, thick patterns. But inside my head, as I walk, nothing. I have no sooner registered them than they are forgotten, gone without even leaving a scar. Or else I am under water, 3,000 fathoms deep, in a world of slime that quivers and swirls into sluggish clouds under my feet.
No, I hear nothing. Silence is in my head. I do still hear something, but it is so hard and so terrible that it thrusts me even farther into silence, it hurls me yet more light-years away from a free existence: it is the sound of my footsteps. One, two, one, two, one, two, dull blows of heels on the sidewalk’s concrete, blows as though I was driving nails in with my feet. Plodding of my footsteps, alone, in rhythm, tenaciously, alone, quite alone. I walk over myself and bury myself. The noise of my heels echoes through the world, it is just as though I were hastening, knowing that escape was necessary, along a deserted corridor reigned over by a silence that was tubular.
It is this silence which abstracts me. It is because of this silence that I am no longer there; silence dense as an ocean in front of which one sits and stares. Silence of cast iron, of ferro-concrete, silence of a lake of mud. I should never have thought such a thing possible: to be in the midst of so much noise, so much matter and light, and hear nothing. Balls of wax thrust into the auditory canal, balls of calm water. Screen of unbreakable glass that has been raised without my knowledge, isolating me. I shall never be able to re-experience the music, the long, complex music of anonymous cacophonies.

[The Book of Flights, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]