PA NK
promise something, what, perhaps something very small, perhaps ev ev-
11
erything, but in fact proffers nothing at all, I despise every lousy little pebble, you can’t escape its meanness, the tenacity of its meanness, its ill intentions; one goes into town and everywhere clambering about,
endlessly acting out their daily routines, their lives, in a manner consis consis-
tent, as they most definitely think, with how they wish to be regarded,
to be seen, slyly (they think) evading all evidence to the contrary, are its citizens, citizens-as-shopkeepers, citizens-as-clerks, citizens-as-read citizens-as-readers-of-newspapers, citizens-as-citizens, it’s when their paradoxes come
to the fore, their contradictions, they turn on you and are revealed in all
their meanness and cruelty, truly at one with, truly of, the biting cold,
the wind, and the rain, which is driven into you by the wind, like little pin-pricks, that’s how it is mean, this place, with its inhabitants, they are its claws, it is mean in spirit, a spirit which gets into you, into your
head, clouding, or is it crowding, your mind with its damp, its cold, its ennui ennui, a kind of mental fog, all its fog being in its inhabitants’ minds only. Here evenings set in early, impossibly early, earlier than anywhere
else in the world, night gathers and descends swiftly, nigh forcefully,
almost instantaneously, I do not know what phenomena are enlisted to bring this about, but it happens this way, I can tell you with absolute surety, in all honesty, and I am then left here in my room, worst of all,
no recourse, with myself, with my mutterings, with the crumbling plas plas-
ter above my bed, with the play of the lamplight on the wall—surely Mother would scold me for being so wasteful, for burning the lamp at
so late an hour—and with my thoughts of Eben, for it is in fact Eben’s
room in which I stay now, lying in his bed, reading his books, using his bureau to store my collection, it is Eben’s shoes I wear now, Eben’s
clothes I wear now, his coat and his cap I wear now, quite simply be because I did not have much to bring, for I have never had much, but it is
I alone who am here now, muttering away in the monstrous night, mon monstrous because it shows me what is hidden by the day, or is it everything
is larger, more insistent at night, like the sounds which are carried up
from the train depot, sounds which are nearly imperceptible in the day day-