...of withdrawal

But there is no exit, no miracle, no truth. Shells, protective armour. Ever since that stifling day when it all started, when everything stopped. You hug the filthy walls of back streets, your right hand knocking against the porch-steps, the bricks of the facades. Sitting for hours above the Seine, your legs dangling, you contemplate the scarcely perceptible eddy caused by the arch of a bridge. You withdraw the four aces from your fifty-two cards. How many times have your repeated the same amputated gestures, the same journeys which lead nowhere? All you have left to fall back on are your tuppeny-halfpenny bolt-holes, your idiotic patience, the thousand and one detours that always lead you back unfailingly to your starting point. From park to museum, from cafe to cinema, from embankment to garden, the station waiting-rooms, the lobbies of grand hotels, the supermarkets, the bookshops, the art galleries, the corridors of the metro. Trees, stones, water, clouds, sand, brick, light, wind, rain: all that counts is your solitude: whatever you do, wherever you go, nothing that you see has any importance, nothing that you seek is real, everything that you do, you do in vain. Inviting or calamitous, solitude alone exists, this solitude with which, sooner or later, every time, you are confronted; every time, you face it alone and defenceless, raging or distraught, in despair or impatient.

You stopped speaking and only silence replied. But those words, those thousands, those millions of words that dried up in your throat, the inconsequential chit-chat, the cries of joy, the words of love, the silly laughter, just when will you find them again?

Now you live in dread of silence. But are you not the most silent of all?

[A Man Asleep, Perec, G.]