A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian's half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions - they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness.

"When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I'm instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter's declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities-I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not-that one endures.

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it the more we contemplate him.