I’ve become resigned to having my soul for a cloister and to being no more to myself than an autumn in an arid expanse, with only a glimmer of living life, as of a light which expires in the canopied darkness of pools, with no energy and colour but that of the violet splendour of exile when the sun dips behind the hills… I have no other real pleasure besides the analysis of my pain, nor any other sensual delight besides the morbid dribbling of sensations when they crumble and rot – light footsteps in the murky shadows, and we don’t even turn around to find out whose they are; faint songs in the distance, the words of which we don’t try to catch, for we are lulled more by the vagueness of what they’re saying and by the mystery of where they come from; hazy secrets of pallid waters, filling the and nocturnal spaces with ethereal far- aways; bells of distant carriages, and who knows where they’re returning from or what laughs and gaiety they contain, because from here they’re just distant, drowsy carriages in the dull torpor of an afternoon in which summer is giving way to autumn… The flowers in the garden have died and withered to become other flowers – older and more noble, their dead yellow more compatible with mystery, silence and solitude.