Phonetically, however, much remains unclear. Incidentally, a count of the word ‘ich’ in Stirner showed that nearly 25 percent of the text consists of ‘ich’ (and its derivatives). Keep that up, and soon the whole text will be one continuous ‘I.’ Yet if one searches life, is there much ‘I’ in it?”

Come dusk the bustling “T” would go exhausted to bed, usually under a bookmark, while I, so as not to disturb it, would pace from corner to corner in the dark. And every time, I distinctly heard my soul—with a high thin tinkle, drop by drop—dissolving in the emptiness. The drops were rhythmic and ringing, they had that same familiar glassy sound. This may have been a pseudo-hallucination, I don’t know: It’s all the same to me. But at the time I gave this phenomenon a special name: psychorrhea. Meaning “soul seepage.”

Sometimes that measured flight—drop by drop—into the emptiness even frightened me. I would turn on the light and shoo both the dusk and the pseudo-sound away. The dusk, the boredoms, the “T,” and the hallucinations would all disappear: It was then that that ultimate loneliness, known to only a few of the living, would begin, when you are left not only without others but without yourself.

There was, however, another, foreign something to disturb my black leisure. From a fairly young age, you see, I had been visited by a strange figment: 0.6 person. This figment arose as follows. One day, while leafing through a geography book, I came across this line: “In the country’s northern latitudes the population per square mile is 0.6 person.” It stuck in my mind’s eye like a splinter. I squinted and saw a flat white field stretching away past the horizon, a field divided into right-angled square miles, snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes. And in every square, where the diagonals intersect, it, a stooped, thread-paper body bent low to the bare, ice-covered ground: 0.6 person. Exactly 0.6. Not just half, not half a person. No. A small, dissymmetrizing fillip had attached itself to “just.” The incompleteness, contradictory as this may seem, had been infiltrated by a remainder, by an “over and above.”

I tried to banish the image. It would not go. Then suddenly one of those semi-beings (I could clearly see the ones in the squares closest to my eyes) slowly began to turn toward me. I tried to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t: They seemed to have fused with the dead empty sockets of 0.6.

And not a blade of grass anywhere, not so much as an ice-covered rock, not a speck; only windless air and snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes.

From then on, 0.6 person took to visiting me on my empty days. During my black intervals. This was not a ghost, a vision, or a sleepy reverie. No, it was just that: a figment.

Now, when I try to describe the accident that befell my “I” in terms more exact, I am helped by symbols of mathematical logic. A point in space may be found, they say, only by means of intersecting coordinates. But should those coordinates come apart, then . . .space is vast, while a point has no size at all. Evidently my coordinates had come apart, and to find me, a psychic point in infinity, turned out to be impossible.

Or clearer still: The theory of curves knows certain imaginary lines which, when they cross, produce a real point. True, the “reality” of this point is peculiar, out of fictions. That may well be the case with me.

In any event, I did not notify my “friends” and “acquaintances.” I did not ask for the expressions of “sympathy” due me.