He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.

The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.

Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don’t get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.

They did nothing – other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.

The clouds floating white and restless in the sky were those you see only in May or June. They were innocent companions, still young and flighty, who ran playfully across the blue road to hide suddenly behind high mountains, linking arms and running away, sometimes crumpling up like handkerchiefs, sometimes unravelling into streamers, and eventually playing a practical joke by setting themselves down on the mountain like white caps.

For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.

And the child – your child – was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.

But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.

My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.