I returned to the hotel after wandering around the streets and felt the surge of emotions that come over you when you’re alone in a room just after a breakup, and thought that for a while now, mostly when I was suddenly awake, I’d be feeling an extreme sorrow weighing down upon me, though it came from far away, and then the sorrow would gradually fade away, which seemed to be the sad thing about breakups. And I tried to think about a more real problem — for instance, I didn’t have very much money left, and had to think about the problem of getting home — but nothing seemed real. Outside, where it was raining, a fierce wind was blowing erratically, and it seemed that the sound of the wind knocking at the window was mocking and picking on every thought I had, my very being. I felt an urge to go home and sit on my sofa in the living room, caressing the fabric sofa with my hand to savor being home, and sit vacantly, feeling the texture of the sofa, as I do sometimes after returning from a trip.
Nevertheless, amid a vague feeling of loneliness and frustration, which gently washed over me, I became seized with a strange feeling, and made a somewhat strange resolve that I wouldn’t even go near the Eiffel Tower, which I couldn’t help but see out the window — the Eiffel Tower could be seen from there as well — as if by doing so I could keep myself from falling even deeper into the distress I was in. I didn’t have anything against the Eiffel Tower, a massive steel-frame structure. The Eiffel Tower was a public historical heritage that was much too famous, and it was difficult to have personal feelings about it, just as it was difficult to have personal feelings about the Egyptian sphinx. No, to be precise, you could have personal feelings about them somehow, in some way, it was quite possible — just as it was possible to have personal feelings about certain things in your house, for instance, a damaged chair with a broken leg, a chipped kitchen knife, or your sock, which you discovered had a hole in it — but it was difficult to express those feelings.
I came to have personal feelings about the Eiffel Tower because I could see the Eiffel Tower out the window the whole time we were quarreling, and I was as tired of seeing the Eiffel Tower as I was of having a long quarrel with her, and grew angrier at the Eiffel Tower than I was at her, and in the end, I was glaring at the Eiffel Tower like someone learning to express a certain kind of anger. It seemed that the Eiffel Tower out the window, soaring high into the sky, was urging me to come to a decision, as if to egg us on to fight, without helping me come to a decision, and it also seemed that everything in the city wanted us to break up. A storm was raging outside as if on cue, as if a huge animal were showing discomfort, a storm that was like a huge animal in itself. And at one point, a bright light that shone in through the window seemed to inflict a wound, almost, like a rock that broke a windowpane and came flying in.
And I hated everything about Paris, which had become the stage for our breakup, even though it wasn’t responsible for our breakup, and I felt that my resentment was justified. I wanted to leave Paris as soon as possible but couldn’t easily do so, perhaps because I thought that the woman I’d broken up with may still be somewhere in Paris.
And there was a certain banality in the Eiffel Tower, the symbol of Paris, which could be seen out the window, a banality that was in everything, which could be found if you looked for it, and I felt the same way about Paris when I left the hotel and wandered around downtown. But it wasn’t just because I was in a poor condition that everything looked poor in my eyes. Everything has its own inherent banality, and I saw such banality in Paris, a city of great cultural heritage. (Writing about a terrible trip I took, as I’m doing now, brings me a strange sort of pleasure. And I watch my pleased self as if I’m watching someone else, confirming once again that I’m a strange person who’s pleased by strange things, which pleases me.)
That night, taking a bath in my exhaustion, I looked at the Eiffel Tower, thinking for a moment about the nature of banality that could be found in an object itself, or in a consciousness interacting with an object, then fell asleep in the bathtub, and had a dream that I was rolling a ball that grew larger or smaller, on a tiny star that, too, continued to grow larger or smaller, and had great difficulty rolling the ball when the star grew even smaller than the ball, which wasn’t a nightmare but gave me a hard time as I dreamt, but when I woke up, I felt nothing, nothing at all indeed, and I thought that the reason why it was difficult for me to have a lasting relationship with someone was because it was difficult for me, even when I met someone and continued to see her, to find a reason to keep seeing her, and thought that perhaps the ball in the dream represented my thoughts. And yet it wasn’t easy for me to find a reason to break up with someone, either, which made it difficult for someone to keep seeing me, as well as break up with me.
Nevertheless, for some reason, I went to the Eiffel Tower area the next day, and snuck my way into a group of tourists and listened for a moment to the guide’s explanation, and in the end, I tried to climb the massive steel tower — perhaps because of the long queue under the tower, made up of people who wanted to climb it, which gradually grew shorter but seemed as if it would never give you a turn, and perhaps I just wanted to stand in the queue without thinking about anything — but when I was almost at the ticket booth after waiting in the long queue, I broke away from it, again for some reason, a reason that may or may not have been reasonable, and then queued up again, once again for some reason — I was making an effort not to climb the Eiffel Tower, which seemed to be beckoning at me with effort, telling me to climb up its body — and when it was my turn, I left the queue like someone who had changed his mind at the last minute, and vowed that I would never come near the Eiffel Tower again, and left the area and checked into another hotel from which, of course, a part of the tower could be seen. I thought of the museums I’d visited on my previous trip to Paris, but I didn’t want to see any paintings this time.
As I lay in bed looking at the Eiffel Tower, which could be seen only in part through the hotel window, I once again had a vague thought that there are certain scenes, objects, that you can see freely at last when they’re seen only in part, and that there are moments in which a part of something becomes equal to the thing itself, although it doesn’t surpass the thing. And I thought that the reason why I didn’t climb the Eiffel Tower wasn’t because I had lost my nerve at seeing the massive tower, which could be seen only in part through the window at that moment, but which stood in stately glory when seen from just below. What did make me lose my nerve, for no reason, was the statue of a peeing boy I saw in Brussels.
In the hotel room I felt uncomfortable looking at the Eiffel Tower, which could be seen only in part through the window, and which reminded me that I was in Paris, and at one point, I leapt up from the bed and ran to the window as if in a race, and closed and opened the curtains several times, repeating the act until the scene out the window looked resigned, and, in the end, I closed the window and the curtains completely so that it could no longer be seen. And then I had the sudden thought that a part of the top of the tower that could be seen from my house, one of the symbols of the city in which I lived, could be seen from my bedroom window, and I felt at ease, thinking that I was in a hotel somewhere in the world. I lay still in bed, listening to the sound of quiet footsteps of people passing through the corridor from time to time, which the carpet absorbed, and when the sound faded away and silence fell again, I mumbled some words that sounded like footsteps.
And at one point I took out the map of downtown Paris I got from the tourist information office, and put a candle flame to the spot I assumed to be the hotel I was staying at and made the small flame spread out in a circle, swallow some areas here and there in downtown Paris, and, in the end, turn the map into ashes, rendering downtown Paris void. And looking at the faint circle of light, created by the candle flame that had set all of Paris ablaze, I came up with the expression “corrupt light.” And I thought of Kafka, who died a terribly painful death due to laryngeal tuberculosis at a sanitarium in Austria — for at the time I was on the last page of a thick compilation of his letters — and pictured myself pacing around the sanitarium courtyard for a moment, looking at the window of the room where Kafka must be dying, and at one point the sanitarium overlapped with the Parisian hotel in which I was staying, for I was coughing severely, like a tuberculosis patient, from a cold I’d caught earlier.