as to what it should signify. "That is quite a matter of
detail," I said aloud to myself, and I clutched my arm and reiterated:
"That is quite a matter of detail." The word was found, God be praised!
and that was the principal thing. But ideas worry me without end and
hinder me from falling asleep. Nothing seemed good enough to me for
this unusually rare word. At length I sit up in bed again, grasp my
head in both hands, and say, "No! it is just this, it is impossible to
let it signify emigration or tobacco factory. If it could have meant
anything like that I would have decided upon it long since and taken
the consequences." No; in reality the word is fitted to signify
something psychical, a feeling, a state. Could I not apprehend it? and
I reflect profoundly in order to find something psychical. Then it
seems to me that some one is interposing, interrupting my confab. I
answer angrily, "Beg pardon! Your match in idiocy is not to be found;
no, sir! Knitting cotton? Ah! go to hell!" Well, really I had to laugh.
Might I ask why should I be forced to let it signify knitting cotton,
when I had a special dislike to its signifying knitting cotton? I had
discovered the word myself, so, for that matter, I was perfectly within
my right in letting it signify whatsoever I pleased. As far as I was
aware, I had not yet expressed an opinion as to....

But my brain got more and more confused. At last I sprang out of bed to
look for the water-tap. I was not thirsty, but my head was in a fever,
and I felt an instinctive longing for water. When I had drunk some I
got into bed again, and determined with all my might to settle to
sleep. I closed my eyes and forced myself to keep quiet. I lay thus for
some minutes without making a movement, sweated and felt my blood jerk
violently through my veins. No, it was really too delicious the way he
thought to find money in the paper cornet! He only coughed once, too! I
wonder if he is pacing up and down there yet! Sitting on my bench? the
pearly blue sea ... the ships....

I opened my eyes; how could I keep them shut when I could not sleep?
The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable black eternity
which my thoughts strove against and could not understand. I made the
most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize
this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if
I named it. Lord! how dark it was! and I am carried back in thought to
the sea an