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I wake at the gloomy hour at which autumn’s hopeless days begin. I lay in bed looking at a window full of rain clouds, but it was really one great cloud resembling a carpet darkened with age. This was the hour for doing life’s books, the hour of daily accounting. At one time people did their accounts at midnight before a good night’s sleep, now they beat their breasts in the morning, woken by the thuds of their dying hearts.

There was blank paper close at hand, in the bureau. The nitroglycerine of the contemporary writer, the narcotic of the wounded individual. You can immerse yourself in the flat white abyss of the page, hide from yourself and your private universe, which will soon explode and vanish. You can soil that defenseless whiteness with bad blood, furious venom, stinking phlegm, but no one is going to like that, not even the author himself. You can pour the sweetness of artificial harmony, the ambrosia of false courage, the cloying syrup of flattery onto the vacant whiteness and everyone will like it, even the author himself.

Which way to turn in this last lap? To the bitter left or sweet right? The same cloud was still outside the window, or a collective of clouds made uniform. On long, thin legs the rain flitted across the rusted windowsill. Once there had been something there. Forms, colors, scraps of emotion in violent movement. My life, or somebody else’s. Most likely some made-up life. A collage of readings, incompletions, old films, unfinished fantasies, legends, dreams which did not come true. My life. A cutlet made of protein and cosmic dust.

Immersed in that cloud or in those few consolidated clouds was the Palace of Culture, which once, in its youth, had been the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science. The enormous, spired building has inspired fear, hatred, and magical horror. A monument to arrogance, a statue to slavery, a stone layer cake of abomination. but now it is only a large, upended barracks, corroded by fungus and mildew, an old chalet forgotten at some Central European crossroad.

A few windows wink at me like weak little flames. Flirting with unctuous familiarity. But who upended me? I’ve been set on my side. I’ve been set aside. I was lying on my left side and listening to my heart, which cannot be heard. I was thinking about the fragile chain of chemical reactions which causes my eyelid to rise, my stomach to rumble, the skin on my forehead to wrinkle, or makes the ordinary bladder creak with muffled pain. It causes the rush of words and images we call thoughts inside or outside of my head, it causes a cloud of waves — longing, a spasm of hatred — to appear; it causes a missile of fear of the eternal unknown to be shot into space or fires a cartridge of the pleasure of knowing a morsel of truth. That little chain of chemical reactions suddenly broke one day for many of my friends, and I don’t know where they are now, whether they are doing penance near a handful of phosphor aerating in the cemetery’s earth or if they are receding in the convulsions and vibrations of their own individual waves, racing into the depths of infinity or ricocheting off the blank wall at the end of that infinity and will return here, where I will no longer be.

The first sounds of life could be heard in the building. This building, this great engine moved slowly into daily life. And so I reached for my first cigarette. The cigarette before breakfast tastes the best. It shortens your life. For many years now I have been laboring at shortening my life. Everybody shortens their existence on the sly. There must be something to all that. Some command from above, or perhaps the law of nature in this overpopulated world.

I like the misty dizziness in my head after a deep drag of bitter smoke. I would like to say some suitable farewell to the world. For ever since I was a child I have been departing from this life, but I can’t quite finish the job. I loiter at railway crossings, I walk by houses where roof tiles fall, I drink until I drop, I antagonize hooligans. I am approaching the finish line. I am in the final turn. I would like to say farewell to you somehow or other. I long to howl in an inhuman voice so that I am heard in the most distant corner of the planet and perhaps even in neighboring constellations or where the Lord God resides. Is that vanity? Or a duty? Or an instinct which commands us castaways, us cosmic castaways, to shout through the ages into starry space.

We’ve become intimate with the universe. Every money-hungry poet, foolish humorist, and treacherous journalist wipes his mouth on the cosmos and so why can’t I too hold my head up high to where rusted Sputniks and astronaut excrement, frozen bone-hard go gliding past.

And so I would like to say farewell somehow. I dreamed of teeth all night. I dreamed I was holding a pile of teeth like kernels of corn in my hand. There was even a filling in one, a cheap Warsaw filling from a dental co-op. To say something complete about myself. Not as a warning, not as knowledge, not even for amusement. Simply to say something which no one else could reveal. Because before falling asleep or perhaps in the first passing cloud of sleep, I begin to understand the meaning of existence, time, and the life beyond this one. I understand that mystery for a fraction of a second, through an instant of distant memories, a brief moment of consolation of fearful foreboding, and then plunge immediately into the depths of my bad dreams. In one way or another everyone strains his blood-fed brain to the breaking point trying to understand. But I am getting close. I mean, at times I get close. And I would give everything I possess, down to the last scrap — but, after all, I don’t own anything and so I would be giving a lot of nothing — to see that mystery in all its simplicity, to see it once and then to forget it forever.

I am a biped born not far from the Vistula River, of old stock and that means I inherited all their bipedal experience in my genes. I have seen war, that terrible frenzy of mammals murdering each other until they drop in exhaustion. I have observed the birth of life and its end in that act we call death. I have known all the brutality of my species and all its extraordinary angelicalness. I have traveled the thorny path of individual evolution known as fate. I am one of you. I am perfect anonymous Homo sapiens. So why couldn’t a caprice of chance have entrusted me with the secret if it is, in any case, destined to be revealed.

These words have a sort of gala quality, the luxury of an idler, the twists of a pervert. But, after all, all of you who from time to time put the convolutions of your own lazy brains into gear are subject to these same desires and ambitions. The same fears and self-destructive reflexes. The same rebellion and resignation.

Two drunken delivery women have knocked over a tall column of crates containing milk bottles. Now, standing stock-still they are observing the results of the disaster, experiencing the complicated and yet at the same time simple process which transforms a mess into fun. The transparent rain has caught its wing on our building, which is rotting with age. A Warsaw building built late in the epoch of Stalinism, when Stalinism, was decadent, the period when Stalinism had become Polonized and raggedy.