33 [154]

Clouds... I'm very conscious of the sky today, though there are days that, when I feel it, I don't see it, living as I do in the city and not in the country where the sky is always so present. 

Clouds... They are the principal reality of the day and I'm as preoccupied with them as if the clouding over the sky were one of the great dangers that fate has in store for me. Clouds... from the river up to the castle, from west to east, they drift along, a disparate, naked tumult. Some are white, the tattered vanguard of some unknown army; others, more ponderous and almost black, are swept along by the audible wind; besmirched with white, they seem inclined to linger and plunge into darkness the illusion of space afforded to the serried ranks of houses by the narrow streets, a darkness provoked more by their approach than by any actual shadow they cast.

Clouds... I exist unconsciously and I'll die unwillingly. I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made out of me, the abstract, the carnal halfway-house between things, like myself, that are nothing. Clouds... how disquieting it is to feel, how troubling to think, how vain to want! Clouds... They continue to pass, some so large (though just how large it's hard to judge because of the houses) they seem about to take over the whole sky; others, of uncertain size, which could be two clouds together or one about to split in two, drift, directionless, through the high air across the weary sky; to one side, in grand and chilly isolation, are other small clouds that look like the playthings of powerful creatures, irregularly shaped balls to be used in some absurd game. 

Clouds... I question myself but I do not know myself. I've done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my life not wasted in thinking up confused interpretations of nothing at all, has been spent making prose poems out of incommunicable feelings I use to make the unknown universe my own. Both objectively and subjectively speaking, I'm sick of myself. I'm sick of everything, and of everything about everything. Clouds... Today they are the everything, dismantled fragments of heaven, the only real thing between the empty earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable scraps of tedium I impose on them, mist condensed into bland threads, soiled tufts of cotton wool in a hospital without walls. Clouds... They are, like me, a ruined road between sky and earth, at the mercy of some invisible impulse, they may or may not thunder, they gladden the earth with their whiteness, sadden it with their darkness, fictions born of empty intervals and aimless meanderings, remote from earthly noises, but lacking the silence of the sky. Clouds... they continue to drift past, on and on, as they always will, like a constantly interrupted winding and unwinding of dull yarns, the diffuse prolongation of a false, fragmented sky.

Read on a cloudy, Sunday afternoon.