It was empty and weighed upon my shoulders like an enormous ball of lead!... My mentality was always slow in getting started: it required stimulation, it had to be lashed with a whip. Because of my ill-balanced sensibility, my passive nature, I easily yielded to intellectual or moral influences, whether good or bad. And again, Lirat's friendship was quite useful to me in the past. My own ideas melted in the warmth of his spirit; his conversation opened for me new horizons hitherto unsuspected; whatever confused ideas I had were cleared up, they assumed a more definite form which I endeavored to express; he taught me how to see, to understand things and made me delve with him into the mysteries of life. Now, the clear horizons toward which I was led shrunk and were shut off before me daily, almost hourly, and night was coming, black night, which to me was not only visible but tangible, for I could actually touch this monstrous night, I felt its darkness stuck fast in my hair, glued to my fingers, coiled around my body in clammy rings.... My study room opened into a yard, or rather a little garden shaded by two large plane-trees and bounded by a wall that had lattice work and was covered with ivy. Behind this wall, in the midst of another garden, the grey and very high façade of a house rose, accosting me with five rows of windows. On the third floor an old man sat near the window opening which encased him like a picture frame. He wore a cap of black velvet, a checkered morning robe, and he never stirred. Shrunk into himself, his head drooping on his chest, he seemed asleep. Of his face I could see only wrinkles of yellowish, wrinkled flesh, dark cavities and locks which looked like tufts of a soiled beard, resembling some strange vegetation sprouting on the trunks of dead trees. Sometimes the profile of a woman would bend over him sinisterly, and this profile had the appearance of an owl perched upon the aged man's shoulder; I could discern its hooked bill and round eyes, cruel, avaricious and bloodthirsty. When the sun shone into the garden, the window opened and I heard a shrill, piercing, angry voice which never ceased screaming reproaches. Then the old man would shrink into himself still farther, his head would begin to oscillate slightly, then he would become motionless again, still more buried in the folds of his morning robe, still deeper sunk in his armchair.