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I have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next. And that morning I certainly had something to think about. Another man might have restored to a talk about life and death, but such weighty words do not come easily to my lips, even when there is no one else there, as was then the case.

I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead, but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead, or vice verssa, I could not ascertain. Death, I learned, was nothingness, and if that was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musing, thoughts, memories. And evidently I was still somewhere: pretty soon it would also become apparent that I could walk, look around, eat (the sweetish mother's-mil-and-honey taste of those liitle buns the Portuguese have for breakfast lingered in my mouth for hours). And I was able to pay with real money. This last, as far as I was concerned, was the most convincing evidence evidence of all. You wake up in a room in which you did not go to bed, but you wallet is lying as it should on a chair beside your bed. That I was in Portugal I already knew, though I had gone to bed in Amsterdam as usual, but that there should be Portuguese money in my wallet was something I had not expected.

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