[From The Book of Disquiet. This is amazing, and rather appropriate to this forum, I think.]
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<p class="MsoNormal">"I'm in a trolley, and, as is my habit, I'm slowly
taking notice of the people sitting around me. For me details are things,
words, sentences. I take apart the dress worn by the girl in front of me: I
turn it into the fabric that makes it up, the work that went into making it -
but still I see it as a dress and not cloth - and the light embroidery and the
work involved in it. And immediately, as in a primer on political economy, the
factories and the labor unfold before me - the factory where the cloth was made,
the factory where the twist of silk, darker in tone than the dress, was made,
which went into making the twisted little things in the border now in their
place next to the neck; and I see the components of the factories, the
machines, the workers, the seamstresses, my eyes turned inward penetrate into
the offices, I see the managers trying to be calm, I follow, in the books, the
accounts involved in it all; but it isn't only that: I see, beyond that, the
domestic lives of those who live their social lives in those factories and
those offices ... All of them pass before my eyes merely because I have before
me, below a dark neck, which on its other side has I don't know what sort of
face, a common, irregular green edge on a light green dress.
The entire life of society lies before my eyes.
Beyond all that I sense the loves, the secret life, the souls of all those who
worked so that this woman seated in front of me in the trolley can wear around
her neck the sinuous banality of a band of dark green silk on less dark green
cloth.
I become stupefied. The seats on the trolley, made of tightly woven strong
straw, carry me to distant regions and into multiple industries, workers,
workers' houses, lives, realities, all.
I leave the trolley exhausted and sleepwalking. I just lived an entire life."<o:p></o:p></p>
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