When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance… - J. M. Coetzee

A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.

The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.

But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.

It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau.