17) Today is 17 July, it is two o'clock in the afternoon and I am listening to Chet Baker, my favourite musician. A while ago, I was shaving, I looked in the mirror and did not recognise myself. The radical loneliness of these few days is turning me into someone else. Nevertheless, I am enjoying my anomaly, my deviation, my monstrosity as an isolated individual. I derive a certain pleasure from being unfriendly, from swindling life, from playing at adopting postures as literature's radical non - hero (which is to say from playing at being like the cast of these footnotes, from observing life and seeing that poor thing lacks a life of its own.

I looked in the mirror and did not recognise myself. Then I fell to thinking about what Baudelaire used to say, that the real hero is he who keeps himself amused. I looked in the mirror again and detected a certain resemblance to Watt, Samuel Beckett's reclusive character. Like Watt, I could be described in the following way: a bus stops opposite three repungent old men, who watch it seated on a public bench. The bus moves off. "Look," says one of them, "someone's left a bundle of rags." "No," says the second, "that is a fallen rubbish bin." "Not at all," says the third, "it is a pile of old newspapers that's been put there." At that moment the heap of rubbish advances towards them and asks them extremely impolitely to move up. This is Watt.

I don't know if I should have written "heap of rubbish". I don't know. I am full of doubts. Perhaps I should terminate my excessive isolation. Talk to Juan at least, call him at home and ask him to tell me again how after Musil there is nobody. ...