Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality. UNIV PLYMOUTH

had no meaning, because, just as I existed on this side of the glass display, I could also exist on the other side, with the same pale face, with the same eyes, with the same lustreless hair, all the things which in the mirror assembled me into a fleeing, bizarre, incomprehensible figure.

      It was thus that there came from the exterior various warnings, immobilising me and abruptly snatching me away from everyday comprehension. They stupefied me, rooted me to the spot, and summed up in an instant the whole of the world’s pointlessness.

      Everything appeared to me in that instant chaotic, just as when listening to a brass band and stopping my ears and then ungluing my fingers for an instant, the music would seem in that instant pure noise.

      I would wander through the fair all day and especially through the surrounding field, where the artistes and freaks from the booths gathered around a cauldron of maize porridge. They were dishevelled and dirty, having descended from their beautiful stage sets and nocturnal existences as acrobats, bodiless women and mermaids into the promiscuous mush and irremediable wretchedness of their humanity. What had seemed admirable in front of the booths, untrammelled and even sumptuous, here, at the back, in the light of day, sank back into petty and uninteresting familiarity, the same as the rest of the world.

      One day, I witnessed the funeral of the child of one of the itinerant photographers.

      The doors of the diorama were wide open and inside, in front of a photographic backdrop, the open coffin lay across two chairs.