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the windows, including me and the man I’ve been describing. I made a casual remark to him and he replied in like manner. His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it’s perfectly useless to hope. But perhaps it was absurd to see this in my supper-time peer .
    I don’t know why, but from that day on we always greeted each other. And then one day, perhaps drawn together by the stupid coincidence that we both arrived for dinner at nine-thirty, we struck up a conversation. At a certain point he asked me if I wrote. I said that I did. I told him about the literary review Orpheu,* which had just recently come out. He praised it, he praised it highly, and I was taken aback. I told him I was surprised, for the art of those who write in Orpheu speaks only to a few. He said that perhaps he was one of the few. Furthermore, he added, this art wasn’t exactly a novelty for him, and he shyly observed that, having nowhere to go and nothing to do, nor friends to visit, nor any interest in reading books, he usually spent his nights at home, in his rented room, likewise writing .
♦
    He had furnished his two rooms with a semblance of luxury, no doubt at the expense of certain basic items. He had taken particular pains with the armchairs, which were soft and well-padded, and with the drapes and rugs. He explained that with this kind of an interior he could ‘maintain the dignity of tedium’. In rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress .
    Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal .
    He never had to face the demands of society or of the state. He even evaded the demands of his own instincts. Nothing ever prompted him to have friends or lovers. I was the only one who was in some way his intimate. But even if I always felt that I was relating to an assumed personality and that he didn’t really consider me his friend, I realized from the beginning that he needed someone to whom he could leave the book that he left. This troubled me at first, but I’m glad to say that I was able to see the matter from a psychologist’s point of view, and I remained just as much his friend, devoted to the end for which he’d drawn me to himself – the publication of this book .
    Even in this respect circumstances were strangely favourable to him, for they brought him somebody of my character, who could be of use to him .

A Factless Autobiography
In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say .
– Text 12

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    I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a