The Man Who Sleeps

Narrator: It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that you don't know how to live and that you never will. Something has broken. You no longer feel some thing which until then fortified you. The feeling of your existence, the impression of belonging to or being in the world, is starting to slip away from you. Your past, your present and your future merge into one. You are 25 years old, you have 29 teeth, three shirts and eight socks, 500 francs a month to live on, a few books you no longer read, a few records you no longer play. You don't want to remember anything else. Here you sit, and you only want to wait, just to wait until there's nothing left to wait. You go back to your room, you undress, you slip between the sheets, you turn out the light, you close your eyes. Now is the time when dream-women, too quickly undressed, crowd in around you, the time when you reread ad nauseam books you've a read a thousand times before, when you toss and turn for hours without getting to sleep. This is the hour when your eyes wide open in the darkness, you hand groping towards the foot of the narrow bed in search of an ashtray, matches, a last cigarette, you calmly measure the sticky extent of your unhappiness. Unhappiness did not swoop down on you, it insinuated itself almost ingratiatingly. It meticulously impregnated your life, your movements, the hours you keep, your room, it took possession of the cracks in the ceiling, of the lines in your face in the cracked mirror, of the pack of cards; it slipped furtively into the dripping tap on the landing, it echoes in sympathy with the chimes of each quarter-hour from the bell of Saint-Roch. How many times you have repeated the same amputated gesture, the same journey's that lead nowhere? All you have left to fall back on are your tuppeny-halfpenny boltholes, your idiotic patience, the thousand and one detours that always lead you back unfailingly to your starting point. All that counts is your solitude: whatever you do, wherever you go, nothing that you see has any importance, everything you do, you do in vain, nothing that seek is real. Solitude alone exists, every time you are confronted, every time you face yourself.