Day 0455

Dreams this morning; childhood home, but discovered that a busy, bustling world could be seen by standing on the roof. Not the secluded retreat hermetically sealed from outsiders, but a part of a bigger scene. There is always a world going on beyond what you see. There is a loft above, a space unthought of, unknown, but there all the time, its own history unfolding. There are the spaces in the walls and floors where generations of vermin have risen and fallen. There is the entirety of the universe, it really is there. Stars and the gaps between them. My Great Auntie's heart still beats after one hundred and one years, my grandparents are all dead, my grandchildren are unborn. And humans have had these thoughts and dreams now and in the past and in the future. What else can there be but religion in the face of such awesome unknowable complexity?

One of the privileges of this fine city of Paris is that you can be born, live and die here without anyone paying the blindest bit of notice to you. Let us therefore reap the benefits of civilization. There were sixty other deaths today: why don't you go and weep over the hecatomb of all Paris? Honoré de Balzac, Old Man Goriot