The general perception of writers’ lives is that they are exciting and desirable. But you generally spend most of your time cooking and cleaning. - Karl Ove Knausgård

I stopped for a few seconds by the newspaper stand wondering whether to buy the two evening papers here, the two biggest publications. Reading them was like emptying a bag of trash over your head.

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

Besides, tomorrow everything would look different. The day always came with more than mere light. However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly unaffected by the day’s new beginnings.