Like Diogenes of Alexander, all I asked of life was that the sun should not be taken away from me. (...) While out walking, I have constructed perfect sentences, which, once I’m home, I forget. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences belongs entirely to the fact that they were lost or partly to the fact that they were never written down. I hesitate before doing anything, often without knowing why. How often — like the straight line appropriate to my nature (conceiving this in my head as the ideal straight line) — I deliberately seek out the longest distance between two points. I’ve never had a talent for the active life. I always bungled the gestures no one else gets wrong; what others were born to do, I always had to struggle not to forget to do. I always want to achieve what others achieved almost casually. Between myself and life there have always been panes of opaque glass, undetectable to me by sight or touch; I never actually lived life according to a plan, I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, my dream began in my will, my goal was always the first fiction of what I never was. (...)