But even through the spatters I could see the trees in the garden tossing in time to the wind’s blows like people tormented by toothache. I ordinarily sat in a splayed armchair, among my books and boredoms. The boredoms were many: I had only to close my eyes and cock an ear—and I could hear them sliding lazily across the creaky floorboards, dragging their felt-shod feet.

For days on end, from dusk to dusk, I thought of myself as a biconcave creature inaccessible both outwardly and inwardly, from within and from without: Both were equally forbidden. Beyond reach.

Sometimes I too, like a tree tormented by the wind, would toss between the oak arms of my chair in time to the tedious tossing of an idea: The dead, the idea glimmered, are to be envied. Barely stiff, and down goes the lid; on top of the lid goes damp earth; on top of the damp earth, sod. And that’s that. But here, as soon as you begin bumping along in a dray, they cart you on and on like that, from pothole to pothole, through spring and winter, from one decade to the next, unmourned and unneeded.

Now, when I think back on my state then, I cannot understand how an absurd trifle to do with some pieces of glass could have so wounded and discombobulated me. I cannot understand how my soul, if indeed I still had one, could have been crushed and desoulerated by such a speck of dust. But at the time, I took that trifle as an object lesson to me from my “glassy adjunct.” Even before, my attempts to penetrate the world on the far side of my biconcave ovals had been few and fearful. If the formula natura abhorret vacuum[1] has been disproved, I now know why its converse—vacuum abhorret naturam[2]—has yet to come under attack. I think it will prevail.

Be that as it may, I ceased all attempts to enter my outside. All those passes at friendship, experiments with another person’s “I,” endeavors to give or take love—I must, I thought, forget and renounce them once and for all. For some time I had been mentally constructing a flattened little world in which everything would be in my here—a little world that one could lock away inside one’s room.

Space, I reasoned while still in earliest youth, is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars, and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves. I have long preferred the narrow margins of books to the monotonous miles of earthly fields; the spine of a book has always seemed more intelligent to me than confused lectures about “the roots of things”; the sheer accumulation of those things, everywhere one looks, strikes me as crude and meaningless compared to the wise and subtle concatenations of letters and symbols hidden in books. Though the lines in books deprived me of half of my eyesight (55 percent), I never resented them: They knew too well how to be meek and dead. Only they, those silent black signs, could deliver me, however briefly, from my importunate, listless, and sleepy boredoms. It was then, while finishing up at the Institute of Oriental Studies, that I became completely absorbed in the painstaking work of my dissertation: The Letter “T” in Turkic Languages.

I still feel deeply indebted to that little two-handled “T” for the trouble it took and the help it gave me during that black lightless time. That “T” led my eyes from lexicon to lexicon, down long columns of words, never letting me sink for even a second into oblivion; that tiny, black-bodied letter stirred up the dust on my books, showed me tangled paragraphs in old glossaries and collections of syntagms. Sometimes, in an effort to amuse me, it would play hide-and-seek: I would hunt for that tiny sign, twirling my pencil along the lines and down the margins of a book, until I found it hidden in among other letters and symbols. Sometimes I even smiled at this. That’s right, I smiled. But the companion of my leisure could be of greater comfort still. “You see, ‘I’ is just a letter,” the “T” would say, “just like me. That’s all it is. Is it worth grieving over? Here and gone.”

I remember that then, between things, on a lark, I took up the philology of “I.” My notes—if only they aren’t lost—must still be in a folder somewhere. But I haven’t time to look for them now. I quote from memory (inaccurately, I’m afraid): “‘I’ has a changeable root, but always a short phoneme. I-ich-moi-я-yo-ἐγῴ-io-ego-аз. One can hypothesize the process of its shortening, or ‘contraction.’ Most likely, it is the result of ordinary speech patterns.