Anyway,’ he thought, ‘it did at some point.’ But he left the sentence unfinished.

‘What are the things that seem strange to me? The most trivial. Mostly inanimate objects. What is it that seems strange about them? Something that’s new to me. But that’s exactly it! Where do I get that “something” from? I feel its existence; it has an effect on me; as though it wanted to speak. I am as over-excited as someone who is supposed to be able to lip-read a paralysed man’s words from the distortions of his mouth, and is unable to do it. It’s as though I have a greater aptitude than other people, but one that is not fully developed, an aptitude that exists, that makes its presence felt, but doesn’t work. The world for me is full of silent voices: so am I a clairvoyant, or am I prone to hallucinations?

‘But it isn’t only inanimate objects that have an effect on me. No, what increases my doubt is that it’s people, too. Up until a certain point in time I see them as they see themselves. Beineberg and Reiting, for example — they have their storeroom, a perfectly normal attic hideaway, because they like having somewhere they can retreat to. They do one thing because they’re furious with one boy, and something else because they want to prevent another boy from swaying their schoolmates. Perfectly clear and comprehensible reasons. But today they sometimes appear as though I’m dreaming and they’re characters in my dream. Not their words, not just their actions, no, sometimes everything about them, if they are physically near, has the same effect on me as inanimate objects do. And yet I hear them speaking just as they did before, I can see that their actions and words fall under exactly the same categories ... I’m forever sensing that nothing extraordinary is taking place, and at the same time something within me is forever protesting that it can’t be so. This change began, if I remember correctly, with Basini’s ...’

Here Törless glanced involuntarily over at Basini.

Basini was still sitting hunched over his book and appeared to be memorizing something. Seeing him sitting there like that, Törless’s thoughts fell silent, and once again he could feel the effects of the seductive torments he had just described. For just as he noticed how quietly and innocuously Basini was sitting in front of him, in no way distinguished from the boys on either side of him, the humiliations that Basini had undergone sprang to life in his mind. He did not think, with the affability that comes with moral reflection, of telling himself that after suffering a humiliation every human being has the potential at least to try to appear casual and confident as quickly as possible. Rather, something immediately stirred in him with a terrible whirling motion like a spinning-top, momentarily bending Basini’s image into the most incredible contortions, then tearing it apart into the most unimaginably dislocated postures, so that he himself grew dizzy. But these were only comparisons that he came up with in retrospect. During that moment he had only the feeling that something within him was whirling up like a crazily spinning top from his tightened chest to his head, the feeling of his dizziness. Into the midst of that, like sparks, like coloured dots, leapt feelings that Basini had on various occasions inspired in him.

In fact the feeling had always been one and the same. And more precisely it was not a feeling at all, more of an earthquake deep within the core of him, which caused no perceptible waves and which none the less made the whole of his soul tremble with such restrained power that the waves of even the stormiest feelings seemed in comparison harmless ripples on the surface.

If that single feeling had seemed different to him on different occasions, it was because, whenever he wished to interpret those waves that flooded through the whole of his being, all that reached his consciousness was a series of images. It was as though all that could be seen of a swell stretching endlessly into the darkness was individual particles spraying up against the rocks of an illuminated shore, before falling back exhausted out of the circle of light.

So these impressions were unstable, changing, accompanied by an awareness of their arbitrary nature. Törless could never keep them still, because each time he looked more closely he felt that these surface phenomena bore no relation to the weight of the dark mass below, which they seemed to represent.

He never ‘saw’ Basini in any vivid, plastic physical attitude, he never had a real vision. It was only ever the illusion of one, a vision of his visions. For he always felt as though an image had just flashed across the mysterious surface, and he never managed to catch it as it was actually happening. So he was always filled with a restless unease, such as that which one feels watching a cinematic film when, despite the illusion of the whole, one is unable to shake off a vague perception that behind the image which one receives hundreds of different images are flashing by, each quite different when seen individually.

But he didn’t know where to look within himself for that power to create an illusion - a power which always fell short, by an immeasurably small degree, of being quite strong enough.